Benson’s Glasgow


Harry Benson

Category Non-Fiction
Pub Date September 2007
ISBN 1 84502 111 8
Extent 224 pp.
Price £25
Format Hardback, 230 x 306 mm
Plate/Illustrations Full colour/black and white photographs throughout



The Beatles may have taken him to America but Harry Benson was a Glasgow boy first of all and, while he went on to capture some of the most iconic images of the past five decades across the world, it’s to Glasgow he now returns to tell his story in this spectacular book of photographs.

An award-winning photographer for LIFE, People, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair among others, Harry Benson’s pictures, as well as his uncanny ability to always be in the right place at the right time, are legendary. The Beatles pillow-fighting, Nixon resigning, the Berlin Wall falling – Harry can immortalise a moment like no one else. And here he documents his hometown with the same unmatched eye that has produced such exceptional pictures of everyone from US Presidents (he’s photographed every one since Eisenhower) to celebrities (Harry talked his way into photographing Elizabeth Taylor bald as a coot after surgery and got Muhammad Ali in the same frame as The Beatles).

Covering more than fifty years, Benson’s Glasgow shows the bygone city of shipyards and industry, as well as the bustling, modern Glasgow of today. It shows the regular people who animate its streets and make it what it is as well as some of its most famous faces in a collection of unforgettable images (and the stories behind them) from one of the world’s most renowned photographers.