Photojournalism is the worst it's ever been. Nobody is doing anything. Today all the photographers are making setup shots, where you go in to shoot someone with a couple of assistants and a few stylists. Everyone does it. I do it. It's the ValueJet of photojournalism -stuck in the mud. In the end, those kinds of portraits mean nothing. They don't convey any information. The idea in that kind of photography is to make a picture the subject will like. That’s not journalism.
- Harry Benson - , American Photo
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Growing up in the war, listening to Churchill's speeches, being bombed in Glasgow every night - that brought me to photojournalism. It was the drama - I wanted to be close to the center of things.
I was next to Bobby (Kennedy) when he was shot. It was hideous. Part of me wanted to crawl away. I couldn't. That was when I had to deliver. I was saying to myself, "Don't fail now, fail tomorrow." The Kennedy thing - I still wake up in the night and think about it. I even remember the f-stop. It was 1.4
- Harry Benson -
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I don’t know what I would have done if I had had to work for a living.
- Harry Benson
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I was next to Bobby [Kennedy] when he was shot. It was hideous. Part of me wanted to crawl away. I couldn’t… I still wake up in the night and think about it. I even remember the f-stop. It was 1.4.
- Harry Benson
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If people don’t like the pictures, I don’t care. To me, there’s only one point of view: that’s mine.
- Harry Benson -
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Well, people like the idea that somebody from a magazine is coming to photograph them, they like telling their friends … But there is a price to be paid for that! I want them to make themselves interesting, I don’t want them to be sitting on the couch all the time. What I’m doing is keeping their image alive.
- Harry Benson -
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A good photograph to me is simple: what is in it, that’s all. Photographs don’t lie.
- Harry Benson
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..I’m not interested in what fashion photographers do, for example, because they take the same picture all the time. It’s the same lighting, the same picture because basically they’ve got the best looking girl around and the best looking clothes.
- Harry Benson
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