Benson was born in 1943 in Newport, Rhode Island, and received a master’s degree from Yale University. In 1966 he took a job as a printer, where he discovered that photography lay at the root of all modern printing trades. The artist photographed extensively throughout the United States, initially with an 8×10-inch view camera but also with a handheld high-end digital camera. Acknowledged as one of the world’s preeminent printers and a pioneer in printing technology, Benson developed a technique that results in deeply saturated, vivid images that actually look like the world from which they are taken. Benson was the recipient of two publication grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (with Eakins Press), two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Rhode Island Governor’s Medal for the Arts and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. His work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; as well as numerous private collections. He became an adjunct professor at Yale University in 1979 and served as Dean of the Yale University School of Art from 1996 to 2006.