Harvey Benge’s The Traveller gathers photographs made over a period of fifteen years or more, tracking journeys that run from the South Pacific through Asia to Paris, the city described as his European spiritual home. The geography matters, but the book is not presented as a travelogue. Benge treats the journey as a frame for recurrence: loss, impermanence, and the strange connections that occur when unrelated places are set beside one another. The self-portraits threaded through the sequence make the argument explicit. The traveller is present, but only as something passing.
Benge’s method is interrogative rather than conclusive. The publisher states that his photographs never offer answers, only questions to tempt the curious, and the tone moves between an acerbic, wry response to a world in free-fall and moments of humour, affection, hope and unexpected beauty. The book is described as part fiction, part autobiography, and that doubleness is what keeps it from settling into either confession or reportage. Benge is a New Zealander who works in Auckland and Paris, and the perspective is that of someone for whom no single location is fully home.
The Traveller is Benge’s seventh book published by Dewi Lewis. Published in 2016 as a 96-page hardback with 88 colour photographs, it measures 290mm x 207mm and represents a sustained body of work rather than a single trip’s yield. For collectors of the photobook as a form, Benge’s standing is relevant: he has twice been a finalist for the Prix du Livre at the Arles Photography Festival in France, and his work has been exhibited extensively in public and private galleries in Britain, throughout Europe, and in New Zealand. He is also involved in curatorial projects and runs ongoing photography workshops with international photographers at Auckland’s AUT University.
What distinguishes this volume is the way its uncertainties are held together by design. Nothing is offered as certain, and the sequencing refuses the comfort of resolution. Yet the book is not austere. Its wit and its openness to beauty keep the questions alive rather than merely rhetorical. Readers who value photobooks that think in sequences, and who return to them for the way images argue with one another, will find The Traveller worth close attention.
