Born in Newport, Rhode Island, Benson attended the St. George's School, then spent three months at Brown University before dropping out and joining the United States Navy.

[3][4][5] Benson had a broad range of interests in the photographic print: aluminum,[3] silver, platinum, palladium, and ink.

[4] Working in these different mediums, sometimes learning forgotten crafts and sometimes creating new ones, by the 1970s he was convinced that ink and the modern photo offset press—with its ability to make multiple passes that build an image from multiple layers of ink—possessed a potential for photographic rendition beyond anything else previously known.

By the 1990s he began working on the relationship between the computer and traditional photographic imagery,[3] and applied the lessons from this in the production of long-run offset books of work by different photographers, in both black and white and color.

[4] He was the uncle of stone carver Nicholas Benson, the owner of The John Stevens Shop.