In remarks to guests at his newly opened gallery celebrating the work of legendary photojournalist Harry Benson this week, Wizards and Capitals owner Ted Leonsis mentioned that he’d just read a biography of Enzo Ferrari. “The first thing he did when he designed his car was he ripped off the rearview mirror,” Leonsis gushed. “He said, ‘I don’t care what’s behind us.’”
To be fair to the billionaire, Leonsis was in the habit of declaring his future-focused-ness long before his plan to move the Wizards and the Caps to Virginia fell apart last spring after Democrats in the General Assembly refused to back the proposal championed by private equity vulture-turned-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. (Youngkin promptly turned his attention to purging voter rolls.) Soon after the Virginia deal imploded, the District announced it would spend $515 million on upgrades to Capital One Arena as part of an agreement that will keep the Wizards and the Caps downtown until at least 2050. Loose Lips reporter Alex Koma points out that several of the mogul’s pettiest demands—including that he be exempted from taxes that benefit D.C.-based sports franchises he does not own—have been weeded out of the final proposal.
One of the ways Leonsis is demonstrating his renewed commitment to the District of Columbia is via the two-story, 10,000-square-foot makeshift gallery in a former hair salon adjacent to the arena that celebrates Benson’s work and its connection to the federal city.
The Glasgow-born Benson rocketed to fame in his early 30s, when the London Daily Express assigned him to photograph the Beatles in Paris. Benson subsequently accompanied the ascendant Liverpudlians on their first U.S. tour in 1964. On Feb. 11 of that year, the Beatles played their first American concert at the Washington Coliseum—formerly the Uline Arena, and since 2016, a “flagship” REI outdoor recreation store in NoMa. (So it’s not necessarily a love of corporate naming that prompted Leonsis, at a press conference last Monday, to refer to the site as “REI Arena” while waxing on the breadth of Benson’s career.)
“Harry is, I believe, the world’s most important living photojournalist,” Leonsis said.
Certainly, Benson’s photos of politicians, entertainers, and athletes from Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor to O.J. attorney Johnny Cochran and U.S Army General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf made him one of the key figures in how the most powerful people in the second half of the 20th century were perceived. He covered Robert F. Kennedy extensively—he was standing next to the presidential candidate when an assassin shot him dead on June 5, 1968. Unsurprisingly, Benson’s decision to publish his pictures of the tragedy—including one of a terror-stricken Ethel Kennedy attempting to push him away from her just-shot husband—was controversial.
Leonsis, a longtime collector of Benson’s photographs, called the 94-year-old shutterbug “my best friend” in his remarks earlier this week. The occasion was the opening of the exhibit of about 180 Benson photos from the personal collections of Leonsis and his business partner, Jeffrey Skoll. Portraits of every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower are part of the show, along with photos of Ali, the Beatles, Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, and other notable figures.
“We developed this with an eye for Instagram,” Leonsis said. “Big pictures, small copy.” His audience laughed, but Leonsis wasn’t kidding.
At a separate press conference last Monday attended by Loose Lips, Leonsis couldn’t resist comparing his own makeshift gallery to the more permanent one on the other side of 7th St. NW.
“I walked through the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery around the corner the other day, and this is nicer,” Leonsis said. “This tells a better story. And so, your move, Smithsonian! Let’s uplift.”
Pressed on the comment moments later, Leonsis said, “the Smithsonian was created to collect, not to tell a story.” He then pivoted to praise Benson’s dedication to his craft. “This man was very close with John Lewis and with Martin Luther King,” Leonsis said. “In Selma, Alabama; in Mississippi, he was tear-gassed, was arrested, beaten. It’s an amazing history when you sit with him and talk to him.”
It’s clear enough from his “tells a better story” comment that Leonsis was talking about curation, not the quality of the National Portrait Gallery’s holdings. Still, the NPG might take umbrage, given that the 62-year-old institution’s published mission statement is “to tell the story of America by portraying the people who shape the nation’s history, development and culture.” Comparing an exhibition of a single photographer’s work focused on a single city to that of a gallery comprising a variety of such exhibitions is hardly an apples-to-apples scenario. It’s more like apples-to-orchard.
In fact, the NPG hosted a show of Benson’s work—organized by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery—in 2007. Ironically, then-Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau’s mixed review of that exhibit shares a common element with Leonsis’s far more extemporaneous remarks from 17 years later. Garreau criticized Benson for having frequently staged the scenes captured in his famous photos—a shot of the Beatles having a pillow fight, for example, or another one, 28 years later, of Bill and Hillary Clinton canoodling in a hammock outside the Arkansas governor’s mansion.
“What you see is an awww-inspiring photo of two people who seem very much in love,” Garreau wrote of that shot of the Clintons. “The viewer, however, might be happier appreciating the image and not reading the wall caption. For there it is revealed that Benson set it up.” He does not dispute Benson’s skill or artistry as a photographer; it’s simply his claim to be a photojournalist that makes Garreau cry foul. “The reason Benson is not well remembered may be that, much of the time, the territory he worked was not so much news, as he might have you believe, but what only can be described as display advertising,” Garreau concluded.
The review got Garreau a published rebuke from Benson himself, who called it “gratuitously mean-spirited and embarrassing.”
But Garreau did advise visitors to just enjoy the photos and ignore the captions. Or as Leonsis put it 17 years later, “Big pictures, small copy.”