From The Beatles to the KKK, photojournalist Harry Benson has enabled millions of readers to live vicariously through the eye of his lens for over five decades. Yet somehow he has managed to avoid the limelight himself, preferring to let his work do the talking instead.

Sitting in his comfortable apartment in downtown New York, the veteran photojournalist Harry Benson is nursing a torn stomach muscle. Surprisingly, the injury is not the by product of a violent story gone awry, but the result of old age.

“Do you know how I got this?” the amiable 75-year-old asks as his wife Gigi prepares lunch in the background. “This is unbelievable. I sneezed!”

Coming from a man who has escaped unscathed from the brutal American Civil Rights clashes of the sixties, bomb making assignments in Belfast with the IRA and rebel warfare in the Dominican Republic, a torn muscle brought on by sneezing might seem comedic if it wasn’t so obviously painful.

“I didn’t know you could do it like that either!” he laughs, “But I’m an old guy now, I guess I’m not as tough as I used to be.”

In a field where weakness is the difference between a front-page exclusive and a place on the dole queue, Benson’s portfolio of the great and ghastly is evidence of his enduring strength and vision.

“Let me tell you some of the jobs I’ve covered,” he says in his distinctive Glaswegian accent. “I did the Berlin Wall going up, I did the Berlin Wall coming down. I was next to Bobby Kennedy when he was shot dead. I covered the race riots in ‘66 and have personally photographed every American President since Eisenhower. But do you know what I really wanted to do with my life? To play in goal for Scotland.”

When you look back at the photographer’s early years, it’s easy to see why a career in football seemed so appealing. The son of a Scottish zoologist, Harry left school to become a delivery boy in Glasgow, not because his family were poor, but because he was academically challenged.

“I’ve never been able in my life to do anything that bores me, never,” he states. “It was hard back then. I had to leave school at 13, because I was stupid. I remember all of my classmates would be rehearsing for a Gilbert and Sullivan play and I would be out on the streets in dungarees. I felt like such a loser. Not only that, my parents made a point of telling me what a loser I was as well.”

After two years studying at the Glasgow School of Art, Harry was enlisted into the RAF for his national service. Although he told everyone he was in the radar division, he was actually the cook.

“I tried to join the photography club, but it was run by a lot of poofy English boys,” he laughs. “They wouldn’t accept me because they didn’t like my pictures. In hindsight they were probably right, the pictures were shit.”

After a three-month spell cleaning the barrack’s toilets, which he enjoyed immensely (it gave him more time on the football field), Harry left the RAF just before his twentieth birthday and began to dedicate all of his spare time to photography. Using Catholic weddings as his training ground, the young snapper would attend early morning ceremonies, rush back to his garden shed, develop the photos and run back to the reception in time to sell them to the drunken congregation. Not only did such events help to improve his technique, the sale of his prints also helped to bolster his self-confidence.

“Those early wedding assignments gave me the discipline to get it right, because you didn’t get a second chance,” he recalls. “By that stage photography was an obvious direction for me to go in. There was a lot of anger in me and photography was a road out. I wanted to be in the middle of something, to photograph people like Churchill. And not only that, it was simple, you didn’t have to be a mathematician to figure out what was a good picture and what wasn’t.”

Following a summer job at Butlins holiday camp, he Harry was offered a position at Glasgow’s Hamilton Advertiser, introducing him to the riveting world of Masonic lodge outings and women’s guild meetings. Knowing that he was better than such provincial banality, the cocksure Scot began to make clandestine pilgrimages down to Fleet Street in an attempt to break into the capitol’s tough press corp. In 1955 he visited Freddy Wackett, the deputy picture editor of the Daily Sketch.

“I showed Freddy some new pictures that I had done and on my way out he gave me a little smile. So I said to him ‘there’s a chance isn’t there?’ and he just nodded. I went back to the Advertiser and within three days they called and gave me the job of covering the whole of Scotland for this big London newspaper. I was 26.”

After becoming the first ever Scotsman to win an Encyclopaedia Britannica award, the Sketch moved Harry down to London in time to experience the dawning of a new decade – the swinging Sixties. Eager to impress, on his first day on the job he broke an unwritten rule – respect your elders. Sneaking in front of a veteran photographer, Harry was astonished to feel a prod in his back. Turning around, he slammed his fist into his aging competitor, and broke a bone in his hand as a result. Suffice to say, his bosses at the paper were less than pleased when they found out. 

“Photojournalism isn’t a team sport,” he says, chuckling at the memory.

After two years of chasing skirt and stories around London, Harry, in his confrontational style, gatecrashed a society party hosted by Sir Max Aitken, son of Daily Express proprietor Lord Beaverbrook. Being the only photographer there Harry stood out from the rest of the crowd and was soon summoned to the bar to meet the host. Both shocked and encouraged by his gall, Aitken offered Harry a job at the Daily Express. In his best Queen’s English, Harry accepted the job with the words, “One is always trying to better oneself”. But after six months of silence, Harry still hadn’t received the promised telephone call. In a chance meeting with Aitken outside Lord Beaverbrook’s London apartment, Harry asked him what had happened to the offer. The next day he received a call from the paper’s picture editor offering him the job. He later found out that the reason it took so long was that everyone on Fleet Street regarded the Glaswegian photojournalist as trouble.

“I guess a lot of my reputation was due to my insecurity. I wasn’t going to let anyone push me aside.”

In 1964 Harry received another offer down the phone line, but this time it wasn’t one he was too eager to take up.

“I was packed and ready to go to Africa, to do a story on their independence. At about 11 o’clock I got a phone call saying that the editor wanted me to go to Paris with The Beatles the next day. I really didn’t want to go. I thought ‘a big time photographer doesn’t go on the road with a pop group’. But he insisted, so I went to France with them. It was there that I saw Beatlemania swell. I remember Brian Epstein came into their room one night and said ‘lads, we’re number one in America with ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ and have been booked onto the Ed Sullivan show for two weeks time.’ When I informed the Express, they told me that I was to go with them. It may sound strange, but I knew I wasn’t going to come back.”

As history has shown, the ensuing two weeks gave The Beatles the key to America’s musical goldmine, and gave Benson some valuable visual collateral with which to make a permanent move to the States.  In 1965 he became The Daily Express’ American correspondent and and by 1968 he had scooped the ultimate photojournalistic accolade – a contract with Life, the world’s foremost picture magazine.

“It doesn’t do you any harm if you’re carrying Life magazine in your back pocket. Secondly people don’t want to go through this life unnoticed. People want it to be recognised that they passed this way but I’m going to make them work for it, I’m not just going to do a self serving picture of them, I want a few pictures. Photographers these days take loads of lights, they’ll bring caterers, hairdressers and stylists – it’s all fucking bullshit, it costs a fortune for one well lit, mediocre picture. It tells you nothing of the person, it tells you more about the photographer ‘oh god his lighting is marvellous’. Who gives a shit about the lighting you don’t know anything about the person. The idea of a good picture is that you go back and look at it, you turn the page and then you come back. That’s what you hope for – you’re not going to do that every time believe me.”

By the time 1971 rolled around he had become Life’s most published photographer.

“You see the one thing Tim I’ve tried to do is variety in my photography life, I’ve tried to cover the circle, I’ve tried to do every job possible. I never backed down from a shit job which I knew was absolute shit, like standing out in a street waiting to get somebody like Marlene Dietrich leaving a hotel – a shit job, but the picture was worthwhile, because I was able to put myself at any level. It took me a long time to get a job. It’s worked out fine, I’ve had it easy in a way because I know I would have stayed in Glasgow married to some fat woman and been mortgaged to hell.”

© TIM NOAKES 2007