Elizabeth Benedict
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My mother was a gifted painter and sculptor, and though none of her drafting talents trickled down to me, I grew up with an eye trained on art. As a teenager in Manhattan in the late 1960s, I became a gallery- and museum-crawler with friends who were doing the anti-hippie thing, being aesthetes instead of revolutionaries. This was long ago, when 57th Street and Madison Avenue was the center of art-for-sale. I started college thinking I would be an art history major, but when I was sophomore, a charismatic English professor read a personal essay I wrote in response to a VIctorian novel and told me that I wanted to write a novel. This had never occurred to me, but it turned out to be a good insight. In fact, I wrote five novels, several other books, and lots of other things, and somehow more than twenty years passed. During that time my contact with photography was as a very casual picture taker, an ardent admirer, a student of photographic history, and the author of a novel whose main character becomes a photographer (The Beginner's Book of Dreams). I was enchanted to learn that Eudora Welty was a serious photographer, and kept this in the back of my mind as something I might do one day. In late 2005, Nikon announced it would cease making film cameras, and I immediately went on eBay to buy one of the ones remaining. I got an FM3 with a basic 50mm lens for $90, and I take it with me whenever I go someplace new or remotely exotic. I'm happy if I get one or two good pictures out of 50. I think I learned these odds from Cartier-Bresson. I'm fascinated by run down buildings and signs in a Walker Evans way, but some of that is because I've been afraid to get too close to strangers. I'm working on summoning my courage and sharpening my reflexes. Taking pictures is a completely different impulse from writing and a different set of nerves, but I'm drawn to some of the same things: beautiful settings, heartbreaking juxtapositions, people in moments of reverence, joy, or insouciance, people and places about to disappear. Among the places I've gone with my new-old camera are my friend Charlie's house in Santa Monica, Berlin, New York City's Chinatown, the Gay Rights Parade in New York, and Coney Island, whose dilapidated wonders are not long for this world.
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