Framed Images: Harry Benson's Photographic Poses

Back in the day, when it was still not remarkable for high-ranking editors to drink heavily at lunch, an idea became popular that news organizations should become more transparent. We should hire reader representatives called ombudsmen. We should offer tours of the newsroom.

"Bad idea," said one veteran for whom the adjective "grizzled" came hard-won.

"The less the readers know about how a newspaper is put together, the happier they are."

These days, if you find a bottle in a reporter's bottom drawer, it is of balsamic vinegar. But the show at the National Portrait Gallery called "Harry Benson: Being There," certainly supports the idea that the less you know about how the photographs of yore were obtained, the easier they are to like.

Ancient photo editors, when asked how to make prizewinning pictures, used to growl, "F8 and be there." (Back when you had to choose your own camera settings, F8 was an all-purpose lens opening.)

Benson certainly succeeded in being there, wherever in the last half-century you found the rich and famous. He boasts an impressive résumé. His stuff has appeared in Life, People and Vanity Fair. Glasgow-born, he now has a show here originally organized by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Yet his name is not well remembered, even by photojournalists, even though he has worked in the United States for 40 years and is still alive.

Benson learned his craft in the British tabloids of the 1950s. Still, it would be nice to look at the work of someone who presents himself as a photojournalist without the words "conniver" and "sycophant" coming to mind.

Take, for example, his 1992 photo of Hillary and Bill Clinton. What you see is an awww-inspiring photo of two people who seem very much in love. The viewer, however, might be happier appreciating the image and not reading the wall caption. For there it is revealed that Benson set it up. "Spotting the hammock in the garden of the Governor's Mansion," it reads, "he persuaded Clinton and his wife Hillary to climb in."

He set it up and they were in on the setup. The whole thing is not so much the capture of a spontaneous, character-revealing moment as an elaborate exercise in image enhancement.

You ask yourself, is the emotion presented in the photo all hokum? Is it a campaign ad flying under the colors of a news photograph with the corrupt complicity of and at the instigation of the photographer? Or is it only partial hokum, an act for the camera by two people who are certainly professional politicians but who also actually do have feelings for each other and who have had many moments like this?

Either way, you liked the picture more when you thought of it as capturing the unguarded emotions of people in a complex relationship, before you started thinking of it as two complex people in a complex relationship engaging in a sales job.

This is hardly an isolated incident. The Beatles' pillow fight? Benson talked them into staging it. The shot of the Beatles with Muhammad Ali, the then-Cassius Clay? Benson lied about where they were going to get the band into the car. "Lennon hated it," we learn, "blaming Benson for setting them up and refusing to speak to him for a month."