Career
Benson was assigned to travel with The Beatles on their inaugural American tour in 1964. One of his most recognizable images shows the band in a gleeful pillow fight in a hotel room. Other celebrities Benson has photographed include Bobby Fischer, Michael Jackson, who allowed him access to his bedroom, and Elizabeth Taylor, whom Benson photographed before and after her brain surgery.
Benson was standing next to Robert F. Kennedy when the Senator was shot on June 5, 1968 and has remarked on the difficulty of steeling himself in order to document the historic moment: "I kept telling myself "this is for history, pull yourself together, fail tomorrow, not today"."
He has twice been named Magazine Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographer Association (1981 and 1985).
He was the subject of a British Broadcasting Corporation Scotland documentary titled "Photography: Harry Benson (1985)", directed by Ken MacGregor and written by William McIlvanney. Benson was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of The Royal Photographic Society in 2009.
Benson was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2009 New Year Honours. In 2014, he took an official photographic portrait of the Queen, commissioned by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
This was over fifty years after his first portrait of the Queen, taken when she opened a coal mine in 1957.