Harry Benson

Ali Hits George, 1964

Harry Benson was born near Glasgow, Scotland. The photographer was assigned to travel with the Beatles on their first American tour in 1964. His iconic photograph shows the band in a gleeful pillow fight in a hotel room. Benson has photographed every U.S. president from Eisenhower to Trump. He was feet away when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated; in the room when Nixon resigned; with Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Meredith march; and with Coretta Scott King at her husband’s funeral. Benson chronicled the building of the Berlin wall and its fall, and covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Benson received the 2005 LUCIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in Photography and the 2005 American Photo Magazine Award for Achievement in Photography. He was awarded the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Scottish Press Photographers Association and has received the Leica Medal of Excellence twice. In 2009 Harry was appointed a CBE, A Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for service to photography. Benson has received three Honorary Doctorates: Glasgow University & Glasgow School of Art; St. Andrews, Univerity, Scotland; and Glasgow Caledonian University. He has taken over one-hundred cover shots for People Magazine , and his photography has been featured in Architectural Digest and Newsweek . He was under contract with LIFE Magazine from 1970 to 2000. His photography is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Both museums exhibited the 2006-2007 exhibition, Harry Benson: Being There , and the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow held a major retrospective of the photographer in 2008. In 2017, Benson received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York and was also inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame in St. Louis. Harry Benson: Shoot First , the documentary released by Magnolia Pictures to five star reviews, is available on Netflix. With over 40 one-man exhibitions and 16 published books, Harry is working on several new projects, including a limited edition coffee table book on Paul McCartney, which will be published in 2020 by Taschen.