Benjamen Chinn

Benjamen Chinn (April 30, 1921 - April 25, 2009) was an American photographer known especially for his black and white images of Chinatown, San Francisco and of Paris, France in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Biography

Born in San Francisco's Chinatown on April 30, 1921, Benjamen Chinn was the ninth of twelve children. He was introduced to photography at the age of ten by his older brother, John, who taught him how to develop and print photos. Together the two assembled a darkroom in the basement of the family home. Throughout his photographic career, Chinn, an engineer by training, would become known for his skills in the darkroom.

During World War II, he served in the Pacific as an aerial and public relations photographer for the U.S. Army Air Corps. Based at Hickam Field in Hawaii, he and a lone pilot flew reconnaissance missions in bombers that had been converted into unarmed camera planes.

After the war, Chinn returned to San Francisco and was accepted into a new fine art photography program at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), now the San Francisco Art Institute

San Francisco Art Institute

San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...

. In this program, Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....

 and Minor White

Minor White

Minor Martin White was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.White earned a degree in botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933. His first creative efforts were in poetry, as he took five years thereafter to complete a sequence of 100 sonnets while...

 groomed the next generation of fine art photographers in the so-called “West Coast School of Photography.” Lecturers included Edward Weston

Edward Weston

Edward Henry Weston was a 20th century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of...

, Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer known for her photography of botanicals, nudes and industry.-Life and career:...

, Lisette Model

Lisette Model

Lisette Model was an Austrian-born American photographer.Lisette Model was born Elise Felic Amelie Stern in Vienna, Austria...

 and Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration...

. "The climax of every year was the five day, early spring trip to visit Edward Weston and to photograph at Point Lobos State Reserve

Point Lobos State Reserve

Point Lobos is the common name for the area including Point Lobos State Natural Reserve and two adjoining marine protected areas: Point Lobos State Marine Reserve and Point Lobos State Marine Conservation Area...

, which his pictures had made famous. Full time concern with photography was nothing new to us, but on this trip the intensity rose like a thermometer held over a match flame." The close-knit circle of teachers and students would become life-long friends. Chinn was particularly close to Cunningham, and through the end of her life he would often bring dim sum to her house for their lunches together.
During this time Chinn began photographing San Francisco’s Chinatown. His images exhibit a non-judgmental eye and a natural curiosity about people. He made intimate portraits of everyday life in the post-war era. His photos display an intuitive sense of form and movement and he credited his development to his CSFA painting instructors Dorr Bothwell

Dorr Bothwell

Dorr Hodgson Bothwell was an American artist, designer, educator, and world-traveller. She was born in San Francisco, California. She began her art career at the California School of Fine Arts in 1921, under the tutelage of Gottardo Piazzoni and Rudolf Schaeffer.- Travels :Bothwell's travels...

 and Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn was a well-known 20th century American painter. His early work is associated with Abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His later work were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.-Biography:Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr...

. The photos, many of which were taken from his doorstep, create a unique portrait of Chinatown from an insider’s point of view.

Chinn went on to Europe and photographed Parisian street life from 1950 to 1951 while studying sculpture from Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...

 at the Académie Julian

Académie Julian

The Académie Julian was an art school in Paris, France.Rodolphe Julian established the Académie Julian in 1868 at the Passage des Panoramas, as a private studio school for art students. The Académie Julian not only prepared students to the exams at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, but offered...

. He also took painting classes at Fernand Léger

Fernand Léger

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...

’s school, and geography and philosophy at the Sorbonne

Sorbonne

The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...

. He also became friends with Léger and Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography...

. Living in Paris without a darkroom for the first time, he developed the negatives of the photos he took, but he never printed or saw any of the images until after he returned to San Francisco.

In 1954, Minor White exhibited some of Chinn’s Paris photos at a show titled Perceptions at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...

). White also used one of them for the cover of the second edition of Aperture magazine. At this time, Ben also assisted Wayne Miller and Dorothea Lange as part of the West Coast Selection Committee for Edward Steichen's Family of Man exhibition.

In 1953, Chinn went to work for the Sixth United States Army Photo Lab in the Presidio of San Francisco

Presidio of San Francisco

The Presidio of San Francisco is a park on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Francisco, California, within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area...

. He met Paul Caponigro

Paul Caponigro

- Photography career :Caponigro was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied with Minor White and has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and three grants from the NEA. His best known photograph is Running White Deer....

, then a twenty year-old enlisted man doing his military service at the lab. Initially attracted by their mutual interest in classical music, Ben volunteered to train Caponigro in the technical aspects of negative and print making. Caponigro would go on to become a substantial landscape art photographer. Additionally, he introduced Caponigro to his teachers, now friends, from the CSFA: Adams, White, Lange and Cunningham. Caponigro writes, “Through Ben, I felt that I had been admitted into a 'guild' of serious image makers using light and silver emulsions. Ben's own talent and ability with the camera coupled with his willingness to reach out to another human being gave me a great start and the inspiration to extend myself to those searching to develop within the realm of great art.”

Chinn had a thirty-one year career at the army photo lab where he rose to Chief of Photographic Services and later, Chief of Training Aids & Services Division. Though he stopped pursuing photography as a fine art, his life and relationships as a photographer never ceased. He continued to travel with his camera, photographing the Tarahumara

Tarahumara

The Rarámuri or Tarahumara are a Native American people of northwestern Mexico who are renowned for their long-distance running ability...

 Indians in Copper Canyon

Copper Canyon

Copper Canyon is a group of canyons consisting of six distinct canyons in the Sierra Tarahumara in the southwestern part of the state of Chihuahua in Mexico...

, Mexico, and the indigenous peoples of Teotitlán.

Throughout his life, Chinn developed and maintained numerous life-long friendships. He actively participated in social groups that shared his beliefs in religion, the arts, travel and the enjoyment of food and good company – spending hours discussing classical music, films and the books of the day. He continued to photograph with a 35mm camera and shared his artistry through holiday cards and documentary photography support for Project Concern International

Project Concern International

PCI , , is a non-profit, humanitarian NGO is a San Diego, California-based non-profit health and humanitarian aid organization dedicated to preventing disease, improving community health, and promoting sustainable development...

.

Even after retiring, Chinn's passion for photography continued. For a number of years, he volunteered his time at a neighborhood photo store in Chinatown and spent his days developing customers’ photos on the one-hour machine.

Ben lived in the family house in Chinatown until February, 2008, when failing health necessitated a move to an assisted-living facility. He died on April 25, 2009 at Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente is an integrated managed care consortium, based in Oakland, California, United States, founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and physician Sidney Garfield...

Hospital in San Francisco, California at the age of 87 years.

Legacy

Benjamen Chinn's work was influenced by and influenced the highly productive world of black and white art photography in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. While his work has had a number of exhibitions (see below), it has largely lain unrecognized until the turn of the 21st century. In more than one of his publications, noted landscape photographer Paul Caponigro has acknowledged the influence that studying with Benjamen Chinn had on him.

Author Alexandra Chang wrote, "His work, varying from still life, to the architecture of San Francisco Chinatown, to portraits, exudes an Atget-like quality of a moment from everyday life frozen in time."

Since his death, a process has been developed to archive Chinn's entire photographic work and digitize it for analysis by artists and scholars.

Solo exhibitions

De Anza College Gallery, Cupertino, California, 1965

Benjamen Chinn at Home in San Francisco. Chinese Historical Society of America, San Francisco, 2003

Benjamen Chinn: Photographs of Paris: 1949-1950, Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, 2005/6

Group exhibitions

Mendocino, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1948

Perceptions, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1954

Mt. Angel College, Mt. Angel, Oregon, 1964

San Francisco Arts Festival, San Francisco, 1960’s (four consecutive years)

California School of Fine Arts 125th Anniversary Exhibit, Focus Gallery, San Francisco, 1972

Alumni Exhibition, San Francisco Art Institute, Anniversary Exhibition, Focus Gallery, San Francisco, 1981

San Francisco Art Institute: 50 Years of Photography, Transamerica Pyramid Gallery, San Francisco, 1998

Leading the Way: Asian American Artists of the Older Generation, Gordon College, Wenham, MA, 2001

The First Decade 1946-1956, Alumni Work from The San Francisco Art Institute, Smith Anderson North Gallery, 2006

Perceptions: Bay Area Photography, 1945–1960, Los Angeles Valley College, Valley Glen, CA, 2006

Celebrating 60 Years of Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco Art Institute, September 2006

Asian|American|Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970, de Young Museum, San Francisco, 2008

Collections

Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson

Chinese Historical Society of America, San Francisco

The Hallmark Photographic Collection, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO

External links

• http://www.benjamenchinn.com Website devoted to Chinn's photography with rotating galleries of images.
• http://www.imogencunningham.com Imogen Cunningham, photographer, teacher and friend of Benjamen Chinn
• http://www.williamheick.com William Heick, photographer, friend, classmate of at the California School of Fine Arts
• http://www.philiphyde.com Philip Hyde, landscape photographer, friend, classmate of Ben Chinn at the California School of Fine Arts
• http://www.scottnicholsgallery.com/artists/benjamen-chinn/index.html Scott Nichols Gallery which represented Chinn
• http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-benjamen-chinn25-2009may25,0,4070258.story Los Angeles Times obituary of Benjamen Chinn, May 25, 2009