By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 7, 2007
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."
Over the decades, Benson hung out with a lot of important people. His major trick was photographing them as they wished to be seen. His photo of the Reagans is a prime example. They are dressed in formal attire, dancing, just the two of them. Nancy has her foot raised behind her in the way girls used to, in the films, as they were about to be kissed. She is focusing her trademark adoring stare on Ron. He smiles that smile he smiled so well, the smile of the world's luckiest guy. It's a classic. It captures them exactly as they wished to be captured.
Compare that to the work of Richard Avedon. He, too, photographed celebrities. But not only did he not wrap himself in the mantle of photojournalism, he usually caught something far deeper and more revealing than was intended by the person sitting for him. That's why Avedon's name is so much better remembered than Benson's.
Back when Benson was in Hollywood photographing the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, people in newsrooms, when asked by an editor what they were doing, dryly replied, "Bringing truth to millions, boss." The tang of this line was based not just on it being appropriately sardonic. It also captures the ridiculousness of spending one's working days as if the sentiment from John 8:32 might have something to it. That's the one that goes "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."
Two of Benson's images are significant revealers of truths. The one of Ethel Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel, standing over the body of her dying husband, Bobby, staring straight at the camera with her hand outstretched is so haunting and authentic that, we are told, it launched an ethical controversy over whether it should have been published.
The photo of a man in a suit sitting in a plastic chair at National Airport contemplating a carefully folded flag is another one you can stare at for a long time. His son, killed in Vietnam, had just been buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Two more photos easily can be imagined as the work of a charming rogue who uses his wiles to reveal -- certainly a virtue.
"John Mitchell and lawyers, New York, 1974," we are told, occurred because after Mitchell had been acquitted of Watergate-related crimes in Manhattan Criminal Court, Benson followed him to his lawyers' offices. "After the group discovered that Benson was Scottish, they raised their glasses, and Mitchell launched into a rendition of Harry Lauder's vaudeville song 'Keep Right On to the End of the Road.' Knowing the words, Benson joined in while moving a lamp nearer to the sofa and gesturing for the defense team to come in closer on the couch."
The resulting image is quite horrifying.
So is the picture of Michael Jackson standing outside his bedroom door, framed by two extraordinarily lifelike mannequins of children. As the wall caption accurately relates, "Though never deliberately out to debunk . . . you can almost hear Benson's voice emerge from the surface of the picture, 'Ooh, what lovely ornaments. . . . The light is a little better over here. . . . If you could just look this way,' while darkly thinking to himself, 'The gateway of hell.' "
These, however, are the exceptions.
Plenty of the 94 photos -- of Alexander Haig, Caroline Kennedy, the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, Donald Trump, Laura Ashley, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Prince Charles and Princess Anne as teenagers and all the rest -- are fetching, and sometimes marvelously composed and lit. The Beatles' pillow fight is a study in diagonals. Andrew Wyeth is photographed as if walking into one of his own watercolors. Benson even makes Jerry Ford look pensive!
No matter how pretty, however, these are usually staged, artificial works that best serve the purposes of the person being photographed.
"News is what someone wants to suppress," former NBC News president Reuven Frank once said. "Everything else is advertising."
Thus the reason Benson is not well remembered may be that, much of the time, the territory he worked was not so much news, as he might have you believe, but what only can be described as display advertising.
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