AIPAD Talks | Object Lesson: On the Influence of Richard Benson

Join AIPAD Talks and Aperture for an online public program discussing the legacy and work of Richard Benson, whose influence is the subject of Aperture’s forthcoming book, Object Lesson: On the Influence of Richard Benson.

The publication pays homage to a legendary figure whose name is synonymous with the evolving history and philosophy of photographic reproduction. As an expert printer, teacher, and dean of the Yale School of Art, Benson inspired over three decades of students and artisans through his mentorship and work. Lois Conner, artist and educator; Miko McGinty, coeditor and designer of the book; Sarah Meister, executive director of Aperture; and Sarah Stolfa, artistic director of TILT Institute and curator of a show drawn from the material in the book, will discuss the ways in which Benson inspired their practices as educators and artists.

Miko McGinty has been designing art books since 1993. She founded and directs her own graphic design firm in Brooklyn as principal designer. McGinty has worked with a range of artists, museums, and publishers on publications and exhibitions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Yale University Art Gallery; Asia Society, the Studio Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is a lecturer at MIT, Cambridge, where she teaches book design.

Sarah Meister is executive director of Aperture, following more than twenty-five years at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she curated numerous exhibitions, including Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964 (2021), Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (2020), and Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction (cocurator, 2017). Meister’s newest initiative is the Aperture PhotoBook Club, a series of virtual conversations that consider the photobook as a platform for contemporary creative expression.

Sarah Stolfa is CEO and Artistic Director at TILT Institute (formerly Philadelphia Photo Arts Center). Her photographs were published in the monograph The Regulars (2009). She is a lecturer at Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lois Conner is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, New York State Council on the Arts Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Publications of her work include China (2000), Beijing: Contemporary and Imperial (2014), and Lotus Leaves (2018). Conner has held teaching positions at Yale School of Art, Princeton University, and Sarah Lawrence College.

Image: Matthew Monteith, Chip describes the making of the Gilman book to the Yale School of Art 2004 MFA photography class (clockwise from front left: Matthew Connors, Jonnie Andersen, Ted Partin, Richard Benson, Samantha Bass, and Wardell Milan), 2002; from Object Lesson: On the Influence of Richard Benson (Aperture, 2022). Courtesy the artist