HARRY BENSON: One of the Great Scottish Photographers
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JPHOTOGRAPHER Harry Benson is shown above at his home in New York City.
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By HARRY McGRATH
EDINBURGH - The Edinburgh Festival season is underway already. It is, of course, not a single festival but a large number of them - a Jazz and Blues Festival, a Military Tattoo, a Book Festival, a Festival of Politics and the ever-growing Edinburgh Fringe Festival to name but a few.
Until now these festivals ran more or less simultaneously in August. However, the decision to switch the Edinburgh Film Festival to late June and extract it from the congestion caused by all the others a month later, now means that the festival period is extended to cover virtually the entire summer.
I passed up the Dylan Thomas biopic The Edge of Love which premiered at the film festival and the many other offerings in its first two weeks, however, that all changed when I spotted a review by art critic Duncan Macmillan of an exhibition of photographs which have appeared over the years in the magazine Vanity Fair. The exhibition is hosted by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.
Macmillan lectured in Vancouver two years ago as part of Simon Fraser University's "Scottish Enlightenment and Emigration" series and I learned then that his recommendation should be taken seriously.
His review extended an invitation to view the contrast between the original Vanity Fair in Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress where "there is at all times to be seen juggling cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind" and the modern vanity of celebrity portraiture. It was not to be missed.
The exhibition covered both periods of the magazine's existence: 1913-36 and its revival from 1983 to the present day. The early period was distinguished by the number of writers who had their photographs taken - Hemingway, Lawrence, Huxley etc. - and the later one by the preponderance of film stars and politicians. But there was one photographer whose work I was keeping an eye out for - Harry Benson from Glasgow.
Benson has only three photographs in the Vanity Fair exhibition but they are all of major political figures - Mayor Ed Koch of New York; Boris Berezovsky, Russian billionaire and adviser to Boris Yeltsin; and his famous Vanity Fair cover picture of Ronald and Nancy Reagan dancing with each other. It was enough though to remind me of the remarkable story of the young man from humble beginnings in Glasgow and the access to power he eventually attained.
I met Benson a few months ago at the launch of his book Harry Benson's Glasgow in which new photographs of Glasgow are included with the ones he took of his native city before he moved to New York in 1964. Some of Benson's early pictures of the Gorbals area of Glasgow are now iconic images of human beings dealing with urban deprivation with humour and perseverance.
It was his tour of the United States with the Beatles in 1964, however, that made Benson famous. Many of the photographs of the group that are now considered definitive were taken by him, including the famous "pillow fight" between the four members conducted after the song I Want to Hold Your Hand went to Number One in the charts.
After his tour with the Beatles, Benson moved to New York and was soon photographing the rich, the famous and the powerful. He was there taking photographs when Richard Nixon resigned and again when Martin Luther King was buried.
Perhaps most poignant of all, he was the only photographer close enough to take pictures during the chaos that followed the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
One of the photos taken by Benson after Kennedy was shot even featured in the song Outskirts by Canadian folk-rock group Blue Rodeo (There's a picture we've all seen/It was taken in the lobby of the L.A. Ambassador Hotel/It's the silhouette of a man in another's arms). Few people realize that the picture was taken by Harry Benson from Glasgow.
Photography is not one of the things that appears on the tea-towel of Scottish inventions, but it does have a storied history in the country. A Scot, James Maxwell Clerk, took the first colour photography using some tartan ribbon and the famous Rock House Studio of Hill and Adamson on Calton Hill in Edinburgh is generally seen as the major force in the early development of the art of the photograph. Harry Benson is part of a great Scottish tradition.
And he has an interestingly Scottish take on the cult of celebrity. When asked how he was able to get so close to so many famous people, Benson says, with a self-deprecating smile, that he is "a very charming man."
Unlike many of the other photographers who have worked with the modern version of Vanity Fair, Benson doesn't do nude shots. He attributes this reluctance to his Presbyterian upbringing in Glasgow.
So if you are planning to come to Edinburgh for any or all of the various festivals, find time to look at the fascinating exhibition of photographs from Vanity Fair. No rush - the exhibition runs until September 21. In the meantime, have a peek at www.harrybenson.com and see what all the fuss is about.
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