Robert Benjamin
May 2014
Born in Chicago in 1947, Robert Benjamin lived in France in his twenties before moving to New York, buying a camera, and starting to make photographs. He has lived and worked in Santa Fe, Sarasota, Seattle, and the Colorado Front Range over the past 35 years. He currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
“I grew up in small towns in northern Illinois, briefly attending college in the ’60s. After several years living in Paris, I moved to New York City, saw Edward Westons portraits and Atgets gardens and just had to buy a camera. I taught myself what I needed to know to make prints and found I was really only interested in making pictures of everyday life- places, friends and later family. This has never changed. I made prints, put them in boxes, took a lot of Polaroids- showed them on occasion to friends- wasn’t interested in promoting them. In 2010 I agreed to a solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, and the following year the DAM and Radius Books published Notes from a Quiet Life, a book of these photographs. I am still making pictures, writing poems, raising a family—and find I totally agree with Robert Frank’s statement… ‘My work is about life, not about Art.'”
– Robert Benjamin