Rather than a theme, it's an emotion that unifies the pictures in this book. The "there and away" -- what the Japanese refer to as "mono no aware" (the bittersweet awareness of the transient nature of all things). That awareness has made me deeply appreciative of small, fleeting and whimsical moments. The ones that usually go without notice. The ones that make up our lives.
Alexander Payne, the two time Academy Award winning writer and director wrote the foreword to my book. I believe what he wrote captures the essense of what my book is about. This is what he had to say:
Dorothea Lange said, "A camera is an instrument that teaches people to how see without a camera." Tyler Bensinger has been teaching me to see for over thirty years now, but I'm still blind. He makes it sound so easy - "Oh, I have no choice. It's right there in front of me. I just lift my camera and snap."
What I see without a camera is Tyler Bensinger's special gift of seeing, and in traveling the world, what he glimpses is himself. His photography processes the entire world through his interior life, making the entire world his mirror.
Many of his photographs involve juxtaposition - figures in an ofter ironic context that together evoke a spectrum of reaction from laughter to sorrow. Tyler, himself, is a figure of juxtaposition and firmly connected opposites. He is a writer who photographs. He is a photographer who writes. Like many of our friends, when he speaks, he is at once one hundred percent serious and one hundred percent kidding. He may express grief through jokes and jokes through the gravest solemnity. At the root of it all, as with any true artist, is insight - a peculiar and highly personal brand of ethics and aesthetics, and in each photograph one finds his particular brand of humanity and beauty.