Benjamen Chinn: Paris 1950–1951
Terminal 3
Benjamen Chinn: Paris 1950–1951
After the war, Chinn returned to San Francisco and enrolled in a new, fine-art photography program at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, where Ansel Adams and Minor White trained the next generation of fine-art photographers. Lecturers included Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Lisette Model, and Dorothea Lange.Benjamen Chinn was born on Commercial Street in San Francisco's Chinatown district in 1921. Chinn's interest in photography started when he was ten years old. His older brother, John, taught him how to develop and print photographs in the family basement, which they had converted into a darkroom. Later, during World War II, Chinn used his photography skills as an aerial and public-relations photographer for the U.S. Army Air Corps based at Hickam Field, Honolulu, Hawaii.
Chinn, equipped with two large-format cameras—four-by-five Linhof view camera and a Rolleiflex— traveled to Paris to photograph Parisian street life from 1950 through 1951, and brought with him his innate sense of form and composition acquired over many years of creating intimate portraits of everyday life in Chinatown. While in Paris, Chinn studied sculpture with Alberto Giacometti at the Académie Julian, took painting classes at Fernand Léger's school, and studied geography and philosophy at the Paris-Sorbonne University.
In Paris, Chinn photographed numerous subjects, including families, musicians, children, students, shopkeepers, workers, and daily Parisian life. Without the use of a darkroom, he developed the photographic negatives, but he never printed or saw any of the images until after he returned to San Francisco. Benjamen Chinn: Paris 1950–1951 is an enduring photographic record by a gifted and important chronicler of urban-street life at home and abroad. This exhibition of a robust and charming Paris of the past reveals the artist's profound sensitivity and technical skill.
Photography is not permitted.
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This exhibit is beyond the security checkpoint, where only ticketed passengers are allowed.
