Always in the Best Spot

He was there. When John Kennedy swept Paris off its feet and when the Beatles took America by storm. When Freedom Marchers lit a fire through Mississippi and when Watts went up in flames. When Robert Kennedy was shot and when Martin Luther King Jr. was laid to rest. When Richard Nixon resigned. When Romania collapsed. When the first U.S. citizen died in Bosnia. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers did, too.

He was there, and through his uncanny lens, he let us be there, too. Not for nothing is the Oswald Gallery's new exhibition titled "Harry Benson: A Witness to History." For 50 years, the Scottish photojournalist has been present for many defining moments of the 20th century, and – lucky for us – he's recorded them, in images that astonish in the way they capture the essence of a moment or person in this small rectangular frame.

A scrapper from the streets of Glasgow, Benson applied his rough-and-tumble skills to get the shot at the heart of the action. He wasn't above stealing his fellow photographers' shoes from outside their hotel rooms to get a jump on them the next day or climbing a palm tree on the set of Cleopatra to snag an on-the-sly photo of Liz Taylor or hiding in Westminster Abbey to shoot royal weddings. His nerve and drive served him equally well on a battlefield in Afghanistan or in the White House, photographing Churchill or an IRA terrorist.

Photographer Bill Eppridge has a story about the Beatles' arrival in the U.S, told in What They Saw, John Loengard's oral history about photographers for LIFE magazine. "I [was in the press pool] at JFK [airport and] introduced myself to the photographer next to me. He was Eddie Adams from the Associated Press. I said, 'If you had your choice, what position would you like to have?' We both agreed we would want to be right behind the Beatles as they came out of the plane, looking down, across them, over this whole huge mob." Of course, that's where Benson was, and the image is breathtaking. And through the years, Eppridge says, "Every time you'd know what the best spot is, who shows up in that spot? Harry Benson."