Born in Chicago in 1947, Robert Benjamin lived in Paris for several years in his twenties before moving to New York City. There he was introduced to the work of photographers he admired, like Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, and William Eggleston. He bought his first camera and started to make photographs of the subject he found most interesting and accessible—his own life. He has since lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Sarasota, Florida; Seattle, Washington; and the Colorado Front Range. He currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

With no formal training, and no academic or commercial agenda, Benjamin cherishes the freedom to function independently. “I’m just a dad with a camera,” says Benjamin. “I started photography for the same reason any artist does, but I didn’t have the same influences, I didn’t have to please anyone but myself.” Since 1970, he has photographed or worked in a darkroom processing photos nearly every day, while earning his living outside the photography field (mostly in retail sales). He has never been represented by a gallery, and has refused to participate in museum or gallery exhibitions, but he sometimes trades his prints with America’s leading artists, who consider him a peer. After decades of saying no, his friend and DAM photography curator Eric Paddock convinced him to allow the Denver Art Museum to mount his first solo exhibition, Notes from a Quiet Life, in early 2011.

Of his photographs, Benjamin says, “I wasn’t trying to achieve anything other than satisfy my own sense of beauty. I made [my photos] to satisfy something I had never seen before in other photography; I knew of no other photographer that’s photographed his family from birth to death. I was tired of seeing contrived project pictures and angst and social comments about the world ending. That’s all easy to me. To accept love and to accept mystery is not as easy.” Benjamin describes his photos as being “about four different things: they’re about love, they’re about family, and they’re a combination of color and light.”

Benjamin’s kids grew up completely comfortable with the fact that Dad always had a camera in his hand. But while Benjamin’s subjects are often members of his family, his choice of subject and moment is more about what he sees formally. Referring to this photo of his daughter Nellie, he says, “For me it’s simply a good color photo… The fact that it’s my daughter is secondary.” He goes on to say, “To me, that’s an extraordinary picture…everything about it is beautiful. And that’s why I want people to look at it. Not just her, but every edge is beautiful. Every color is just glowing…”

Benjamin is very partial to both the process he used to print his photographs and the paper on which he printed them, because of the quality of color he is able to achieve. This paper was discontinued by the manufacturer in 2009, so it is unclear whether Benjamin will ever find a way to make more prints that meet his requirements, or if he will simply discontinue printing his work. “These are called C prints…they are prints off of negatives. If you took your film to a one hour lab in the old days, it’s the same process I’m using. They look a little different because I had bigger paper, and I could make it myself. That process is now a casualty of technology, it’s pretty much gone. And it was a unique process, very beautiful. It allowed me to make the colors I want appear on paper, which I could probably not do digitally, which I could not do with slides, so it was a very intimate and very personal process…Digital cannot hold these tones, there’s no question about that. So my sense of beauty was tied into the process.”