Nothing Is As It Seems: Harvey Benge Photobooks

My interest lies in the strange anthropology of cities, observing and making photographs of the unusual and overlooked in the human landscape where nothing is as it seems.
– Harvey Benge

Harvey Benge (born 1944) is a New Zealand photographer who lives and works in Auckland and Paris. Benge's work most often takes the form of limited edition photobooks and he recently donated the 60 publications displayed in this exhibition to the E H McCormick Research Library. The photobooks are published by Benge's imprint FAQEDITIONS as well as specialist publishers Dewi Lewis in the UK, Kehrer Verlag in Germany and Super Labo in Japan, among others.

Benge has collaborated with well-known international photographers such as Daido Moriyama to produce multi-volume photobook sets and has worked with a number of writers to create book works that sympathetically combine texts and photographs.

Benge travels widely and creates tantalising titles for his photobooks. He explains his practice as 'setting out to look at the nature of truth, with photographs that meander amongst the often opposing aspects of truth ... in a world where, when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there.