Visual Journeys: Roloff Beny

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 (1924-84) once introduced himself to a stranger as “Dr.
Roloff Beny—the greatest photographer in the world.” Some would
agree. Beny was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of
Lethbridge in recognition of his many striking volumes of photography.
These include To Everything There Is a Season (a centennial
celebration), Japan in Colour, and Persia: A Bridge of Turquoise.

A painter from a small town in Alberta who chose photography as his
first art, Beny is a confirmed traveller with a circle of famous friends
and a taste for high living. Visual Journeys, his latest handsome,
glossy, large-format production, includes 157 full-page plates—41 in
full color—and several self-portraits. Art historian Mitchell Crites,
who collaborated with Beny on several books in the 1970s, contributes a
biographical sketch of the flamboyant artist’s life, along with a
bibliography of his books of photography and a chronology. Jeffrey
Spalding, director of the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, to which
Beny left 600 of his paintings, contributes a five-page essay on the
photographer’s place in history, and Lesley Blanch, who travelled with
Beny in Persia, adds a whimsical afterword.