Robert Benjamin - Notes from a Quiet Life

Notes from a Quiet Life provides a rare opportunity to view works by a true photographer’s photographer, who has traded prints with America’s leading artists, but who refused museum and gallery exhibitions until just last year. Robert Benjamin (born 1947) bought his first camera in 1972, and since then has made humble documents of the life immediately at hand. Notes from a Quiet Life offers unguarded moments with the photographer’s family–his daughter sipping soda, his son peacefully sleeping on the couch and tender moments with his wife–as well as small domestic details and visual surprises encountered on walks to the corner store. The sheer magical presence of the people and things in his photos remind me of the beauty any of us can find in everyday life, says curator Eric Paddock. This volume reproduces 40 of Benjamin’s color prints and Polaroids.