People: Legends in Life and Art

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Roloff Beny is known as a landscape photographer, a passionate traveler,
and a lover of ancient and classical art and architecture. This
posthumous volume of 158 of his photographs (7 in color, 151 in duotone)
reveals his interest in the human face, and a talent for catching the
personality in pose or expression that rivals that of Karsh.

In a short preface, Jack McClelland observes that Beny’s interest in
the individual might stem from a youth spent in a small town in western
Alberta. As painter, writer, and photographer, Beny was multitalented.
Photography allowed him to travel, and to mingle with the rich and
famous, many of whom became his patrons.

Mitchell Crites calls Beny “an artist among photographers.” A short
time spent with People supports this claim. Beny’s diaries reveal that
until late in his life, he thought of his photographs of people as a
private and personal gallery rather than a book in progress. In his last
years he found himself “a traveller returned with the joy of a
thousand faces,” and he began to assemble the volume.

People contains seven sections: Life and Art; Artists and Architects;
Writers; Music and Dance; Fashion and Society; Stage and Cinema; and
Royalty and Heads of State. The first shows anonymous individuals and
named sculptures, or details of sculptures. It includes a Kashmiri
shepherd, a Sri Lankan sadhu, a village cobbler in Iran, and a
traditional Kathakali dancer applying make-up for a performance in
southern India. The Writers and Music and Dance sections feature Irving
Layton, casually seated on a park bench, and a flamboyant Leonard Cohen,
dancing while seated.

One concludes that photography was Beny’s true métier, and his other
talents fed into it. People is an impressive collection of photos not
easily matched, and a look into the human heart.