Benedict J Fernandez

Benedict Fernandez is an American photojournalistic street photographer for the last 50 years. He began his career as a crane operator at a shipyard, and then began photographing his fellow workers which ended up becoming on of his major portfolios 'Rigger's'. After a while he decided to turn his hobby into his life's work, after a while Alexey Brodovitch who was a legendary art director and graphic designer noticed him and asked if he would join his design laboratory. He then arranged for Ben to become the darkroom tech and manager at Parsons School of Design, which went on to be an incredibly influential place of learning for photography, and created a lot of very successful photographers.

During the mid sixties, Fernandez photographed throughout the streets of New York and became one of the most important street photographers of his era. In his time he also photographed a variety of socially significant events, such as protests and demonstrations. Which is why I have come to look at him before my shoot photographing the EDL march in Dudley. Someone once mentioned that Fernandez approached all of the events he photographed as a concerned observer, who has no political initiative to get out of the shoot. He just went and captured what he saw, from an un-biased point of view, which I think is why he is one of the great photojournalists of the time. His focus, quite rightly is heavily set upon the social aspects of these events because it was the people who created them so its obvious that they were his main focus.

One of his techniques which is quite obvious when viewing his work is that he liked to photograph people holding signs. I think this is because the viewer could read the views of the people on the sign and then instantly understand what they were protesting about without any other visual information. This meant that one photograph could potentially represent the whole event to a person who didn't know why this even was taking place. Also when photographing the signs, you also get to see the subjects facial expression which also helps tell its own story about the event. These two pieces of visual information together allow the viewer to get a detailed look upon the event.

Something else he does within his work is take a few steps back from the action to show the scale of the event, which can be seen in the photograph to the left. This represents to the viewer the scale and importance of the event to the viewer which I feel is important to show.


The last technique I'm going to discuss that Fernandez uses in his photography is getting close to the action which makes the subject captured the main focus of the image. This allows the viewer to easily see the subjects emotion on their face which thus represents the publics general emotion to the whole event. This technique can be seen in the image to the left.

I'm going to try and use these techniques while photographing the EDL march in Dudley, which will hopefully result in me covering the whole event and not just a part of it.