Steven Benson
United States
Biography
Steven Benson is a photographer/independent curator and a former Professor of Photography and Chair of the Southeast Center for Photographic Studies, School of Photography and Media Studies at Daytona State College.
He holds a BFA from the College for Creative Studies and MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He is the recipient of three Creative Artist Grants-Michigan Council for the Arts and a NEA/ArtsMidwest Fellowship. His work is represented in numerous collections including the Museum of Fine Art-Houston, Detroit Institute of Arts, Bibliotheque Nationale-France, Centre Georges Pompidou, Museet for Fotokunst-Denmark. Solo exhibitions of his photography include the Centre Georges Pompidou and photography festivals/biennials/triennials in Argentina, South Korea, Germany, Syria, Poland, China, Denmark and FotoFest (2004, 08, 26). A retrospective of his work was on view at the Southeast Museum of Photography in 2012. The Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala, Fl., ‘Invented Observations’, was on view for most of 2022; a survey exhibit of early B&W work made over thirty-years. The Russian curator, Dr. Irina Chmyreva, has included his hand-colored images, “Incantations”, in her exhibition for Pingyao, China 2023
Steven was a Contributing Curator for the SE Museum of Photography (2014-22). Curatorial projects have included: “Roger Ballen: in Retrospect – Four Decades of Photography and Video”; ‘Mind Over Matter: The Photography of Arno Rafael Minkkinen’, among others.
Project
“Infrastructure: Highway Deconstructed” by Steven Benson is a long-term photographic series that reframes the visual language of large-scale construction and landscape transformation through an aesthetic lens. Rather than documenting engineering goals, the project focuses on the materials, forms and altered terrains that emerge during the building of a major highway infrastructure — capturing rebar, concrete, earth, bridges and drainage elements as compositions that resemble site-specific sculptures or land art.
Over several years of work along the new I-4 highway in Central Florida, Benson approaches these environments much like a landscape photographer might approach a national park: seeking out unexpected beauty and poetic form within scenes others might consider purely functional or industrial. His images draw attention to how human intervention reshapes the land, and by making the mundane magnificent, the series invites reflection on the intersection between aesthetics, labor, and environmental change, challenging viewers’ expectations of what constitutes beauty in the built environment.
