In October 2016, with the American presidential election one month away, the New Zealand photographer Harvey Benge worked in San Francisco and New York. The 59 colour photographs he brought back are gathered in The Month Before Trump, published by Dewi Lewis in a 64-page hardback. The book is deliberately partial: two states on the liberal coasts, seen through the sensibilities of a photographer formed by a country where socialism is part of ordinary political speech. Benge does not claim objectivity; he proposes a subjective record, and the title frames the work as a document made at a particular threshold, before an outcome that was still unknown.
What distinguishes the sequence is its refusal to resolve into argument. Benge assembles places, people and fragments of visual information into a kind of time capsule, affectionate in one frame and critical in the next, with an undertow of sadness and futility — the suspicion that little lies behind the hard sell, the fake news, or the glossy surface of things. Yet the book also registers resilience and resistance, a stoicism that anticipates better days. The title inevitably invites retrospective reading, but the photographs were not made with the election result in hand; their tension belongs to the uncertainty of the month itself.
Benge is not a newcomer to the form. He has made many photobooks and has twice been a finalist for the Prix du Livre at the Arles Photography Festival; his work has been shown widely in Britain, Europe and New Zealand, and he has run photography workshops at Auckland’s AUT University. For a collector attentive to the photobook as a considered object, this is a compact, tightly edited sequence from a photographer whose reputation rests on the book form, and a deliberately limited view of a country at an existential watershed.
