PICTURING FLORIDA’S POLARITIES & PECULIARITIES
Photographer Nathan Benn documented life in the Sunshine State during the 1980s for National Geographic. The Miami native resurrects his photos that tell a titillating story in his new book, A Peculiar Paradise: Florida Photographs.
When National Geographic magazine sent photographer Nathan Benn to Florida in 1981, he found his home state a compelling subject for a series of photographs. “I was very engaged by the circumstances of where Florida was in 1981,” says the Miami native. “That particular moment was a pivotal moment in Florida. It really engaged me intellectually as a journalist.”
The state was dealing with an influx of immigrants from Cuba and Haiti. Crime was on the rise because of a flourishing drug trade. A drought was causing agricultural problems.
“You had environmental, social, political and economic disruption, and the obvious ‘trouble in paradise’ headlines,” explains Benn, 68. “But that’s not what made it interesting. What made it interesting was that you had all of that going on—in an extreme form—in contrast to this mystic, mythical paradise of Florida. And for many people it was still a paradise; their lives were not affected.”
When Benn finished that months-long assignment, he believed he had a strong collection of photos with an important story to tell. “The most powerful, significant body of work I had done in my career was this set of photographs,” he says. “I was at the peak of my power as a photographer; I was fast on my feet and could see well, and I knew what I wanted to get in the
picture frame. I evaluate it as the best performance of my career.”
But his superiors at the magazine didn’t feel the same. Benn’s grittier photos didn’t fit the mold of other state or regional stories the magazine had done, which tended to be more travelogues than reportage. The powers that be passed on his photos. “I went from elation to defeat, and I never recovered from that,” says Benn.
Now his inquisitive, evocative and thought-provoking images are finally being published—many for the first time—in his new book, A
Peculiar Paradise: Florida Photographs (powerHouse Books, $49.95). “There’s no other place I have ever photographed, around the world on any continent, where you had such extreme mash-ups and polarities,” says Benn. “Black and white, English and Spanish, north and south, rich and poor, urban and rural, old and young: I think all of these things are things that I wanted to have in the book.”
CHRONICLING CHANGE
Benn spent 19 years as a photographer for the National Geographic Society. In 1993, he launched Picture Network International, the
first online digital asset management and media licensing enterprise that built the foundation for today’s stock photo industry. From 2000 to 2003, he was director of Magnum Photos, the influential cooperative founded by photographers Henri-Cartier Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and Robert Capa.
About 15 years ago, Benn began reflecting on his career and going through his archives. That endeavor led to the 2013 publication of his first book, Kodachrome Memory: American
Pictures 1972-1990, which contained more than 100 images that were organized by geographic region.
Before his Florida assignment, Benn had taken photos for other regional stories for
National Geographic, focusing on places such as Vermont, upstate New York and the Mississippi River. These had met the expectations of the magazine’s editors for the types of photographic coverage desired.
“The big social issue in Vermont was whether or not to allow condos at the ski resorts,” recalls Benn. Kodachrome Memory contains sections devoted to Benn’s photos of New England, the Mississippi River, Pittsburgh and Florida. And in compiling that book, it hit home just how different his Sunshine State images were.
“My own aesthetic and style of shooting changed over 20 years,” he says. “The romantic, Norman Rockwell-esque sensibility I felt in Vermont was out of step with Florida. Florida was transgressive and undisciplined,
The most powerful, significant body of work I had done in my career was this set of photographs. -Nathan Benn
and the subjects were discomforting.”
So it made sense to devote his next book to the 750 rolls of film he’d shot in Florida in 1981—images of a boat full of Haitian refugees, federal agents conducting drug raids, booze-fueled spring breakers. He began organizing the photos and reached out to Charles Churchward for help.
Churchward had served as design director of Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines, had edited, authored and designed several books and, like Benn, had wound up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Churchward agreed to meet with Benn but didn’t expect things to go beyond that. “I didn’t think I was going to do it,” he says.
“I had no desire to do another book. What won me over was seeing the pictures.”
The variety of the images stood out for Churchward. “It’s his inquisitiveness in getting into the subject matter,” he explains. Benn “was getting Cuban guerillas practicing for taking over Cuba, and the building of Epcot Center, which looks very surreal.”
They started selecting images but sometimes had different ideas. Benn had dismissed his photo of an alligator zipping down a slide at Gatorland in St. Augustine. Churchward pushed for its inclusion— as the cover image. “This is a picture that people are not going to forget,” he says. “It’s a news photo but it’s an art photo. It’s memorable, and you look twice.”
“Charlie had this wonderful New York perspective of things,” notes Benn. “It was very energizing and helped me to see my pictures differently.”
They organized the book into chapters focusing on topics such as immigration, the state’s senior citizens, and the growing drug trade. “It really tells a story about America, not just of Florida in the early 1980s,” says Churchward.
FINDING THE WEIRD AND WONDERFUL
While Benn had shot a lot of serious subject matter, his appreciation of the offbeat also comes through in the book. And Florida offers up plenty of potential in that department. “I didn’t go out to photograph wackiness, but just in the course of driving to an orange grove or trying to get a picture at the beach, you turn around and there’s something wacky,” he says. “I really wanted to celebrate that peculiar, wacky, charming, unexpected element.”
A favorite image in this department for both men: a person dressed as an alligator sauntering down a sidewalk carrying a boombox. “I lived in Washington, D.C., for 25 years and New York for 20 years, and I have not once seen an alligator walking down Fifth Avenue with a boombox,” says Benn. “But you turn around in Florida, and there’s somebody dressed as an alligator with a boom box.”
“Nathan has a sense of visual humor,” adds Churchward. “He catches things a lot of people can’t. … The guy strolling down the street in an alligator costume: Other people would let it go and wouldn’t think anything of it, but he had to stop and take it.”
Nathan has a sense of visual humor. He catches things a lot of people can't - Charles Churchward
Benn also has a knack for capturing images of people in their everyday lives, whether that’s two retirees doing yoga on the beach or Navy pilots in training. Churchward finds Benn’s photos from Miami’s Fifth Street Gym particularly compelling: “A lot of people photograph in boxing gyms; it’s very common. But somehow his way of standing back and looking at the people—they’re not posing. They’re doing their thing, and it’s original just seeing it this way.”
For Benn, good photos come from taking his time and being open to whatever comes his way. “When photographing, I like to hang around,” he explains.
“One of the wonderful things about photography is the serendipity. You don’t always know what you’re going to get, especially in the days of film. All of these pictures have some quality of the unexpected. That to me is the thing that makes photography really unique among the arts, that it’s not all predisposed.”
Growing up in Florida had a big impact on Benn’s photography career. He learned about beauty visiting Vizcaya Museum & Gardens in Miami, developed a sense of wanderlust while watching trains come into the Florida East Coast Railway station, and honed his skills working at
The Miami News. “I think that set me up to be very comfortable in my travels around the world, and in entering people’s lives and taking photos without embarrassment,” he says.
His original assignment helped show him how Florida was changing in the ’80s, and it’s changed even more since. When Benn was born in 1950, the population of his hometown of Miami was 84 percent English-speaking Caucasian and 16 percent English-speaking black. Today, it’s 71 percent Hispanic, almost 19 percent black and 11 percent non-Hispanic white.
“I find myself wonderfully in the minority there,” he says. “It’s much more fun to be there now than it was when I was growing up. I would love living there now. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough when I was kid, and now it feels like it’s a great place to be.” In conjunction with the release of A Peculiar
Paradise: Florida Photographs, HistoryMiami Museum is hosting an exhibit of photos from the book, through April 14, 2019. For more information, visit apeculiarparadise.com.