Michael Benson with Icelandic horse on the set of More Places Forever
[picture: Marko Modic]

Michael Benson is a widely published writer, award-winning film-maker, and photographer/image processor. His book Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (Abrams, 2003) won First Prize for Design, Special Trade General Books Category at the 2004 New York Book Fair and has been called “An aesthetic revelation… a spectacular melding of science and art…” (LA Times) and “a pioneering and magnificent collection of pictures… sublimely exhilarating…” (Booklist). The book was printed in English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese. In April of 2007 Beyond became an exhibition of large-scale photographic prints at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and was described as a “stunning series of pictures” (The New York Times) and an “extraordinary exhibition” (New York Magazine). An exhibition of Beyond images will also be toured around the United States by SITES, the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibitions Service, starting in early 2008, and a very large-scale 100-picture version of the exhibition is also slated for presentation sometime in 2009 at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. As a writer Benson has contributed articles on a diversity of topics to such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, Artforum, and Rolling Stone, as well as such newspapers as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune (including multiple Op-Eds). His 2003 article for The New Yorker on NASA’s mission to Jupiter, “What Galileo Saw,” was selected for inclusion in the anthology The Best American Science Writing 2004 (Ecco/HarperCollins). Benson’s feature documentary film Predictions of Fire (1995) premiered at the Sundance and Berlin international film festivals and won several best documentary awards internationally, including the National Film Board of Canada’s Best Documentary Feature award at the 1996 Vancouver International Film Festival. He is currently finishing a feature-length global road movie titled More Places Forever, and starts work on a new book, Far Out, intended to present a definitive look at contemporary astrophotography. It will also serve as a companion volume to Beyond, and will also be published by Abrams. An exhibition based on Far Out is also in the planning stages.