Aaron Lindberg – Blog

Harry Benson and Aaron Lindberg

I had a wonderful opportunity to meet, shoot and listen to world famous photographer Harry Benson.

While on assignment for a client down in Florida, I was scheduled to cover a black tie dinner type thing doing party pics. Not my favorite thing to shoot but I was on the clock so I did what I needed to do. Going into the dinner everyone knew we were going to have a world famous photographer addressing the party so it was very excited to get in there and see if I could meet him before the start of the event.

Walking up to Harry I introduced myself and chatted with him for a couple minutes. Very cool guy, laid back and genuinely nice to talk with. One of the questions I asked was who the most interesting person he ever photographed and he immediately said Bobby  Fisher. I figured he would say The Beatles or Muhammad Ali or any one of the 11 presidents he has photographed but it ended up being a chess player. After listing to some of the things he had to say about Bobby, he looked me in the eye and asked me who my most interesting person I have photographed was. I was taken back by that question because I was not expecting him to ask me something like that, I assumed that  it was going to be more of me interviewing him not him asking me questions. I thought that was great he asked me a question about my work!

After talking with Harry for a couple minutes I decided I would stop firing questions at him and finish up my job. During dinner Harry took to the podium and rolled through a vast array of his photographs. He showed his work from all the various assignments he has covered and the people he photographed for, Vanity Fair, Time, Life, The Beatles, Winston Churchill, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra and hundreds of other remarkable people. With each slide he would comment on the photo and give a little insight behind each image, its always good to hear a little behind the scenes of what was really going on in the images. It was a treat to get to hear about all of these people.

What really took me back that night was that after the show, he sat at a table and autographed his books for about 2 1/2 hours with a line of people that stretched across the ballroom and out the door. I hung around until he signed all of the autographs and was finishing up, thinking to myself that I should just leave and call it a night but something kept me around. After everyone had gotten their books autographed, I went up with mine and sat it on the table. With a smile on his face he looked up at me and said “Hi Aaron, I would have let you cut in line since you are a photographer.” We both smiled and laughed at that comment but what amazed me was the fact that he remembered my name. He opened up my book and turned to the page he autographed, sat for a moment, exhausted after all of the writing and with the marker in his hand and all he could think of was “Good Luck.”

It was wonderful to meet a world famous photographer who has shot so many different people for so many different publications and to realize that he is a genuinely nice person, who is interested in what you are saying even if you are a peon compared to him.  This will be one of those moments I never forget…

Thanks for checking this out, Kansas City photographer Aaron Lindberg.