Biography

A Biography of Neil Benson

By Alex Goldblum

January 2007

Introduction:

Neil Benson, a professional photojournalist who worked in Philadelphia from 1970 to 2000, was staff photographer for Philadelphia Magazine (1975–90) and his photographs were published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, South Street Star, Time, Life, People, the New York Times, and Rolling Stone. His images document Philadelphia in the turbulent closing decades of the 20th century.

Chapter 1: Early Life

Neil Benson was always a tinkerer. His friends and family recall, as a child, Neil always had a work bench in his room, where he would tinker with various electronic or mechanical odds and ends. He rigged up an alarm in his room once as a boy, that would ring if his mother entered his room without permission. The son of a prosperous, middle-class Jewish physician, Dr. Jacob Benson, Neil Benson grew up on North Broad Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Benson was best known for his outstanding bedside manner, and keen knack to make even the sickest of patients laugh. “Laughter is the best medicine” Jacob used to say, and so that is where Neil picked up his unique sense of humor.

It was there in his home on historic Broad Street, in the Logan neighborhood, down the street from Einstein Hospital, where Neil first began to experiment with recording images. His earliest experiments with photography were conducted with the Polaroid instant-developing camera, taking snapshots of his two older sisters making out with their boyfriends; Neil would later use these pictures as a bartering chip to blackmail his sisters into bribing him off. It wasn’t until college that Neil graduated from amateur photography to more professional image-making, when he first discovered the art and science of photography.

Chapter 2: Neil Benson, News Photographer

“I tried to go off to Philadelphia College of the Arts, now University of the Arts, as a photographer, I did not make that cut, so I then changed gears and decide to go to Temple University, as a psychology major, and discovered, before school opened, that they had a newspaper and a dark room, and I could walk into it with my camera, and I spent eighty hours a week in the Temple News dark room, and another ten hours a week in my twenty hours worth of classes.  The Temple news was literally where I cut my teeth as a photographer.  Two years later I’m published in Life magazine, I’m covering Richard Nixon, it was all very whirl-windy.  So um, steps happened so fast that I really didn’t get a chance to choose what I was doing. 

“Life chose me to do it and I just went along with the plan.  Until about ten years ago, when, without realizing it, I had a mid-life crisis.  In retrospect it occurs to me it’s exactly what happened.  I also realize that I went about it very differently.  My best friend is in a similar situation, we both worked for our high-school newspapers and we both were professional photographer for thirty years, George still is.  But, we’ve talked about it with ourselves, and the thing about being self-employed, and having very few responsibilities, means that if your boss is an asshole you’re in real trouble and you don’t end up with a lot of the ‘M’ words that, people who experience mid-life crisis, it forces them into it… ah, mortgage, marriage, money.  All these pressures that generally make people think, ‘How come am I not driving a Porsche with my trophy wife?’ 

“I never went through it, ‘cause all my pressures are self-induced.  And so my mid-life crisis was the core of what they all are, which is, ‘there has to be more to life than this.’  Whatever the ‘this’ is.  Now my ‘this’ was not unpleasant, I was a news photographer, and it was almost as glamorous as people think it is.  But if you do anything for thirty years, you think, ‘there’s got to be more to life’, and my ‘more to life’ was art.  And one day I woke up realizing that more of my life was art than was photography, a different form of art…” that art was dumpster diving: trash art, found object art, or garbitrage.

Chapter 3: Neil Benson, Dumpster Diver

“Neil is an ‘organic intellectual’ as opposed to a ‘traditional intellectual.’  Photography is all about taking advantage of your environment, as is dumpster diving. Photography connects Phenomena with Audience, much like a theatre does for drama.  For Neil, the whole world is a dumpster.  By adopting the trash medium, Neil has retained his artistic grounding yet transitioned into an inverted commercial paradigm.  What happens after an image looses its appeal?  It becomes REFUSE:  Disney drinking glasses, a cartoon lunch box from 1967, neon lights,  typewriters, et al.   The fodder for Neil’s creative work is the fleeting nature of modern society.  Andy Warhol predicted that the television would provide every person with 15 minutes of fame and yet, a century earlier, to take one photograph would require 15 minutes of exposure.  Products and images can become obsolete in the blink of an eye, like a frame on a movie roll.  Thus his work is to weave together the forgotten and discarded artifacts of the information age.”

In 2004, Neil Benson wrote that “I believe TRASH IS SIMPLY A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION - creative re-use of objects is re-vitalization: things are born again- it is spiritually fulfilling to turn trash into treasure. It is artistic alchemy, with the artist as wizard. Trash is a rich medium, infinitely varied and constantly challenging- show me what you discard- I want to make something of it. How much of it do you have- do you throw it away often? Can you even throw anything away anyway? On a sphere like our earth, we can really only throw something away by launching it toward the stars- everything else is simply moving the trash around. Transmutation beats transportation. Re-creating something reduces the flow of the trash tsunami while amplifying and expanding productivity. Re-cycling adds brain power to industrial power, fashioning new uses for old objects. Every day the city puts treasures out at curbside- we just have to go find them. In Philadelphia, our group of salvage artists, the Dumpster Divers has as our motto: Ejectamentum Nummi Nostrum – Your Trash is Our Cash.”

Chapter 4: Conclusion

“In both photography and art I never gave very serious consideration to the finances of it.  It’s not why I do things and, it’s defiantly true in the art field, I actually took a significant pay cut and increased the amount of time I have to spend in my chosen field by switching.  But I’m happy to do it because I feel as though I’m making a significant contribution to my culture by making objects that require thinking the way I want people to think.  As in photography, I still remain at, heart, a propagandist.  I want my view to be the view.  And I wake up in the morning to make sure that I can get my view across to other people through art.  I used to do it through photography now I do it through constructing objects.”