Few people spend their lives immersed in what they love, but for nearly 40 years Martin Benjamin has done exactly that. The popular professor has taught photography at Union since 1979, while pursuing simultaneous careers as artist, photojournalist, rock music chronicler and documentarian. His life is a meeting ground of discovery, pleasure and inspiration, as much a work of self-expression as his photographs. He is one of those fortunate men, never far from his passion and calling.
Benjamin's triumphs are a formidable range of high peaks. He has photographed in China, Vietnam and Cuba, England, Italy and France, and on several trips across America. His camera has put him amid the glitz of Las Vegas celebrities and the ferocity of Albany politicos. He made portraits of U2 before the Irish superband was famous and of Mohammed Ali after the heavyweight demigod's retirement. He's shot hundreds of rock and pop stars, from Dylan, Springsteen and Jagger to Sheryl Crow, The Black Crowes and Counting Crows. His images have been published continuously for 35 years in books and periodicals and on screens around the world, including The New York Times, Village Voice, Tommy Hilfiger's Rock Styles, MTV and VH1. He has exhibited in New York, around America and internationally, and his work is in prestigious public and private collections. After shooting hundreds of thousands of frames of film (and, now, digital files), and making, publishing and showing thousands of prints, his photographer's eye remains hungry.
Benjamin's skill at capturing life's drama is matched by his talent for diligence and commitment. One rarely sees him at gatherings or events without a camera. Though he enjoys golf and surfcasting on Cape Cod, the priority remains work. He spent much of this past summer getting to the Saratoga Racetrack by 5:30 a.m., where he photographed horses, handlers and stable hands as part of a documentary project on the Spa City's racing culture.
For four years, Benjamin has immersed himself in the Saratoga scene, beginning each July, before the meet opens, until early September, when the paddock and betting windows are shuttered for the season. Another photographer would be content with the fruits of a single summer, but for Benjamin, there remains something new to discover and express. “It's got all the great stuff you want,” he explained of his fascination with the track. “It's got an amazing set of personalities, from the richest of the rich to people just getting by hot-walking horses. It's got the animals, which are phenomenal. It's got tension. It's got excitement. Something unexpected could happen any moment. It's got drama, speed and danger. That's a nice group of things to point a camera at.”
Benjamin's professional activities dovetail with his long teaching career, nearly all of it at Union. Benjamin began at the college as a one-term adjunct and never left; he was named Professor of Visual Arts in 1995. Since 1988, he has led semesters abroad to England, Italy and China, and he has received Union grants to support his work in Cuba and Vietnam while on sabbatical leave. But perhaps the best testimony of his importance as a teacher is the number of former students who have gone on to successful careers as photographers themselves.
Professor Benjamin
Indeed, Professor Benjamin's influence on students can be so inspirational it can redirect their lives. Class of 2000 grad Cal Crary was an Economics major when he took Photo I his junior year. “With Martin's guidance, I was able to conclude that photography was much more [to me] than I thought it was going to be,” Crary recalls. Four photo classes with Benjamin later, Crary gave up a lucrative position on Wall Street to pursue life as a professional photographer.
“I had a job lined up with Chase Manhattan as a municipal bond underwriter,” explains Crary, now a freelancer in Brooklyn, “but the challenge of being a photographer was much more valuable as a lifestyle. When I saw the first 16 x 20 [inch] print of my own work hanging on a wall, that was it.”
Developing a career
Benjamin knows what it means to discover your life's path in college. He learned photography as an undergraduate at the University at Albany, and soon was spending his days shooting on city streets and his summers driving across America with a camera and wide-angle lens. His inspiration in those early days was the 1955 book The Americans, by the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank. Frank's grainy, trenchantly ironic images were a model for Benjamin.
“The one book I always had in my van when I was traveling across country was The Americans,” he recalls. “I just could look at it over and over again. Every picture to me was curious-why is it interesting? Why is it a good picture? They are not easy to sum up, not easy to describe in a sentence. They were the pictures I wanted to take, too.” The experience taught Benjamin that photography is more than pictorial documentation, but a means of expression.
His first break came in 1974, when he won a national photo contest sponsored by Life magazine, then the most influential picture magazine in America. Ansel Adams was one of the judges, and the prize was $5,000. The award saved Benjamin from interviewing for a position at a local photo store, the closest he ever came to taking a job purely for money.
In the 1970s, he formed a relationship with the late Howard Chapnick, president of Black Star, a top photography agency. Benjamin had impressed Chapnick, a judge for the Nikon Nutshell Award that he had won, and the assignments followed. The Black Star connection continues through Ben Chapnick '57, Howard's nephew.
In 1977, Benjamin met Fred McDarrah, photo editor of the Village Voice, and he began the work for which he is best known, Rock Shots®.
The photographer knew he had access to many of the same rock acts that played in New York, and he saw an opportunity. “I started sneaking my camera into concerts and taking pictures. My first published picture was Bruce Springsteen in [Albany's] Palace Theatre, 1979. No cameras were allowed. I knew the tour was going to New York in two days, so I took my camera. I developed the pictures and I sent a print to Fred McDarrah-I said, ‘There's no photographers allowed in this tour. I don't know if you're going to get a picture in New York, but you're going to do a review, so here's a picture.' They ran it nice. It was my first nationally published picture.”
He became a pro at smuggling his small Leica 35mm into rock shows, hiding the camera in his pocket, and having a friend carry in the lens. Thus began an archive of photographs that amounts to a visual history of the music from the 1970s through today. Later, assignments streamed in, and he was able to shoot without looking around first. Benjamin's website (www. stockrockshots.com) includes nearly 1,000 artists, from AC/DC to ZZ Top, from one-hit wonders to immortals, from folkies to head bangers to rappers. His work from the 80s and 90s is especially comprehensive, and TV producers regularly contact him for nostalgic images of bands and performers.
In 1981, one of Benjamin's most memorable assignments arrived looking like a dog.
“I got a call from Rolling Stone one afternoon: ‘We need you to go to this club called J.B. Scotts and photograph this unknown band from Ireland called U2. They're going to be the next big thing.' This was at the end of maybe five or six nights in a row shooting the next big thing from across the ocean, and each one was worse than the last. But at least it was for Rolling Stone, so it had some prestige attached to it. I went and U2 showed up, and they were just the nicest, most normal bunch of guys. Bono was like 19 years old. We did the whole backstage thing, the group shots, which is what they wanted. Bono told me, ‘After we go on, I want you to come on stage and be on stage with us and shoot us while we're playing.' I didn't go on stage. I shot from the wings. They did their show, and [afterward] I went back and hung out with them a little bit. For all I knew, they were a band that wasn't going to do anything, or go anywhere.”
The picture remains one of the earliest portraits of the band taken in the United States.
For every memorable photograph Benjamin has taken himself, he has inspired countless images from photographers he has mentored at Union.
“Teaching has always interested me,” he says. It's another way to stay immersed in what you're doing, by teaching it to other people. I've always been driven by trying to teach expression, not process, as the [main] force.
“I think the best thing for students is the possibility of finding their own voice through their photographs. Today's students are dying to express themselves, and that's a way to do it.”
Photography has changed tremendously over the past decade, thanks largely to the proliferation of digital technology. At Union, color photography is taught entirely on digital equipment, thanks to two $25,000 grants from a national foundation. The funds, which Benjamin was instrumental in securing, have considerably expanded the department's digital classrooms, and they will allow for 15 workstations when renovations to Visual Arts are complete in the near future.
But despite the proliferation of digital technology in photography, Benjamin believes the best way to introduce students to the medium remains through black and white film, developed and printed in the dark with chemicals and time.
“It's important that students have to make something by hand and work through the process. It's hard for some of them to realize they failed, and to go back and start over and get it right. It slows them down, which I think is good. When they do the wet process, they come upon their own look, a signature to their work, sooner. It takes longer, but they get that sense of their own voice sooner.”
“Marty was the first to show me that photography is my way of expression,” says Markus Fergus, who was an exchange student from Germany when he took Photo I during winter term of 1995. “Even though he never really said it this way, he made me see was that beauty lies inside simplicity. The difference between a good and a bad picture is not always the time you spend on it. Sometimes the better picture took less time to take.”
“The value Martin places on photography, and the values he places on it, are lessons that are not just useful in photography,” notes Cal Crary. “He really insists that you think for yourself. He could easily tell you what's good and what's bad. He makes you decide for yourself what you think is good. He insists that you develop a voice that is intellectual in nature, and that you have the technical foundations to hold it up.”
During the critique process, “he can understand a person's concepts and a person's voice before they do,” Crary says. “Marty is a ‘picture man,' quiet sometimes, and always looking,” observes Fergus, now a magazine photographer in Germany. “He would not talk all the time, but when he said something about my pictures it was something really meaningful.”
During the past decade and a half, Benjamin's photographs have explored cultures outside the U.S., the result of opportunities provided through teaching. His photographs in China, Cuba and Vietnam are a complex study of life under Communist rule and of his own upbringing as a child of the Cold War. These images, many of them incisive portraits of, at once, individuals and cultures, relate to what may be the photographer's strongest work, an extended meditation on America called “The Atomic Age.” This series, available on Benjamin's web site (www.martinbenjam.com), is beautiful and spooky in a way that approaches both poetry and political commentary. It's the photographer's most personal artistic statement, his version of The Americans.
“Good Shots,” a series of pictures borne of Benjamin's photography class for adult clients of the Schenectady Association for Retarded Citizens, earned him a feature story in The New York Times and the 1997 Golden Light Award for Photography Educator of the Year from the Maine Photographic Workshop. The exhibition, Good Shots: Photographs of and by People with Disabilities, has traveled widely to national acclaim.
Though Benjamin continues to be in demand both in print and in exhibitions (by June of this year he had already shown in four exhibits in and around Albany), he has arrived in the place where the truest reward is the work itself.
“You have to put your work out there to have a career-you've got to produce work and you've got to publish. But, in the last few years, I've come to realize the whole joy of it is the act of making the picture. That moment. Everything after that is work.”
“I think it was [photographer] Larry Fink who said-he was doing a critique of my students and somebody said something about a picture, ‘Oh, well that's just a lucky shot'-and he said two things. He said, ‘Well, okay, but the definition of luck is when skill and opportunity come together,' and then he said, ‘and how come all the lucky shots are made by the best photographers?'” Through the course of a distinguished career, Martin Benjamin has made all his own luck.