Born in Kent in 1954, Michael Bennett took a degree in Fine Art at Leeds. Self-taught in photography from the age of fourteen, he created an intimate project documenting his own family, first seen in 1976 at the Impressions Gallery of Photography, York. It toured the UK, was seen at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and was the subject of a BBC Arena film.
The Victoria & Albert Museum and the Arts Council of Great Britain acquired work from “The Family”, which remains in their permanent collections.
In 1977 he began working for newspapers & magazines, including The Times, The Independent, The Sunday Times, The BBC, Financial Times, BBC World Service, New Society, and The New Statesman. He had a long association with the satirical magazine Private Eye. A number of Bennett’s portraits of prominent British people commissioned by The Independent are in the National Portrait Gallery, London. He has worked both as a satirical artist, using composite printing (more usually known as photomontage), and as a documentary photographer.
He has taught photography and photomontage at a number of institutions, including photography schools in Madrid and Barcelona, where he showed photomontage in the 1984 Primavera Fotografica.
More recently, the Victoria & Albert Museum acquired the complete works which make up “The Family” exhibition, to add to their collection of Bennett’s work, which includes other pictures from his Welsh project. A selection of his pictures was shown in “Seaside Photographed” at The Turner Contemporary, Margate (2019) and the accompanying book (Val Williams & Karen Shepherdson, Thames & Hudson, 2019).