An Interview with Yarrott Benz '72

Because there was so much to cover in the interview, we broke it into two sections. To read about Yarrott’s involvement with Visual AIDS and the AIDS Ribbon, please click here.

Yarrott Benz first came to PDS for summer school but soon transferred over from MBA for his sophomore year.  “I loved the Dem School the first day I walked in and met an incredibly diverse group of kids.”

Is there was one memory that stood out for you from your time at PDS?
That’s easy, it was an upper school music assembly completely arranged by five black students, led by the late and incomparable Donnyss Cotton. They called themselves The Jive Five and when they strutted their entrance into the auditorium, they set the place on fire with their rhythm and their sheer guts.  I remember their beat to this day.  God, it was wonderful….I was electrified.

Is there a teacher who had a big impact on you?
Mrs. Eleanor Hitchcock taught me 10th grade English and I was pretty intimidated.  In truth, she was warm and had a fantastic sense of humor, but it was months into the school year before we got to see that.  One day, an impromptu conversation I had with her in her office turned my head around.  It was very short and very simple: “Yarrott, I like what you say when you write and I like the way you say it. You should write more.”  Coming from her, it gave me a gigantic vote of confidence. Sadly, she died just a few years after we graduated.

Where did you go after PDS and what did you study?  
I stayed in Nashville and went to Vanderbilt because I was giving blood twice a week to my brother, Charley.  He was suffering from aplastic anemia. He received all of his red cells from the Red Cross and all of his platelets from me.

I have written a memoir about Charley and me, called The Bone Bridge. It is still unpublished, but three chapters are in the January 24, 2013 issue of The Montreal Review, as a stand-alone story entitled "The Heart of Florence", so hopefully the book won’t remain unpublished for long.

Do you feel that PDS prepared you well for college?  
I think it stirred me to ask more questions, to dig deeper in class, and, importantly, to see the teacher as human and accessible and fallible.  It showed me that some of the best learning was done conversationally. When I started teaching twenty years later, I used that memory often.

How did you first get interested in photography?  
The Last Picture Show came out in 1971 in my junior year. Draper Shreeve, who is still one of my closest friends, and I saw it eight times together at the Belcourt Cinema and could recite the lines.  Every frame of the movie was extraordinarily composed…like stepping through a fog and being transported to 1950.  I went home and pored through boxes of black and while family photographs from the same years and felt that same peculiar reality.  

What has been your favorite part of being a photographer to date?  
It has to be the visceral excitement of being in the right place at the right time to capture another peculiar reality.  Oregon, a series I did along the Northwest coast, stands out as a project where I feel I managed to do this. I was met with rain and fog the entire week I spent there.  The clouds diffused the light and gave all the photographs a splendid clarity as well as an atmosphere of inclement unease.

How did you get involved in teaching?
By 1990, I had spent over a dozen years as a full-time artist and I was exhausted by the uncertainty of my finances.  A friend suggested that I teach and I laughed at him.  Then I thought again about it and realized that it could be a great way to help me understand what I do, why I make art, why I see the world in a certain way.  I was hired by the highly regarded Quaker school in Manhattan, Friends Seminary, probably the school most like PDS of any school in the city.  I stayed there for fifteen fantastic years and now I'm teaching in my fifth year in Los Angeles at Sierra Canyon School.

What are your hobbies?
I started voice training a year ago and I enjoy singing German Lieder, or art songs, the most; in particular, Schubert Lieder.  The songs come from the Romantic era, around 1825, and they are dark and incredibly beautiful, often written about love and loss. They remind me of the old bridges along the rainy Oregon coast and of the bleak beauty of The Last Picture Show.