Harry Benson
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He was just steps from Bobby Kennedy the night the senator was shot, steps from Coretta Scott King at her husband's funeral, steps from Richard Nixon the day the president resigned in disgrace. He was on hand for the Freedom March through Mississippi, the Watts riots, the I.R.A. hunger strikes, the fall of Czechoslovakia and Romania and the Berlin Wall. He was invited by Jackie Kennedy to shoot her daughter Caroline's wedding (to Edwin Schlossberg), invited into Michael Jackson's bedroom (to take baby pictures of Jackson's son Prince) and invited into Elizabeth Taylor's hospital suite (to photograph the star, bald as a tulip bulb, after brain surgery).
Flip through the new book Harry Benson: Fifty Years in Pictures (Abrams) and one gets the eerie impression that for half a century he has been nothing less than photojournalism's Zelig - the man who happens to materialise, with a camera, whenever history envelops the high and mighty. He covered every president since Eisenhower, the first US casualty in Bosnia, firefights in Kosovo and the pall of smoke above the Twin Towers' wreckage on September 11, 2001. Before there was a 24-hour news cycle, before there was a CNN or a FOX, there was The Fox, a lone lensman from Scotland with a hungry eye trained upon the world's public prey.
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