Columbus photographer Benjamin Willis releases book of community images
A new book of photographs, “The Home We Know” by Benjamin Willis, reveals Columbus in a way that only someone who knows this place and its people intimately could do, with both love and respect.
Willis, 30, grew up on the East Side, attended Otterbein University in Westerville and now lives in the Milo-Grogan neighborhood.
He took the 72 photos collected in “The Home We Know” between 2017 and 2021. They reflect the people and places he encountered in everyday life.
“Some are what I would consider intimate portraits, where I knew the subjects, but most of them are on the street,” Willis said. “I know them through habitual goings of places. It’s an acquaintanceship, not quite a relationship. There’s like a nod. There’s an understanding.”
How Willis got his start
Willis didn’t start out as a photographer. In college, he double-majored in philosophy and art, with an emphasis on painting.
Standup guy:Showbiz jack-of-all-trades Chris Rock to put on standup hat for June 7 gig in Columbus
Stephanie Patridge, associate professor of philosophy at Otterbein, worked with him while he was there.
“Ben is probably one of my favorite students I’ve ever taught at the institution,” she said. “I still see him now, and he is one of the few people who is really trying to live these philosophical experiments he did as a student, writing about ethics.
“He really is a lifelong learner. He’s always reading and thinking, and his artwork is intertwined with his intellectual project of thinking about values. He’s just a really great human, and I’m really glad he’s on this planet.”
The year after he graduated in 2014, Willis was invited to be one of two artists in residence at Otterbein, where Jim Bowling, a professor in the art department, got to know him and his work better.
“One of the things I noticed in Ben’s work early on was that narrative sense,” Bowling said. “He’s probably been a storyteller for a long time. It wasn’t just a figurative study, it was how do you tell a story of this person. His photography shares that with his paintings. I look at them, and I want to know more about that person. They’re compelling images.”
A storyteller at heart
Julie Rae Powers of Soft Lightning, the Brooklyn-based editor and publisher of Willis’ book, became aware of his photography when living in Columbus, from 2013 to 2020.
“From the moment I saw his work, I saw there was such a heart in it,” Powers said.
“I don’t see that in a lot of photography. A lot of photography is sensationalized. His is just a love letter to the community that he sees every day. On top of that, even though I don’t live in Columbus anymore, I still have this big love for Columbus. I wanted to work with someone who clearly cared about what they were doing with the camera and honoring the people that they were taking photographs of. It’s intimate. It’s friendly, even with the photographs of people he may or may not be close with. It feels deeply personal.”
A family atmosphere:Urban Strings orchestras foster rich environment for participants
Powers worked with Willis to narrow down his collection of more than 800 photographs.
“It was a really difficult thing,” Willis said. “At the beginning, I was like, oh, I just need to show my best photos. And then I was like, what makes a photo the best, or makes it perfect?
“At the end of the day, I had to make what seemed at the time hard decisions, but also obvious decisions. I have so many color photos and so many black-and-white photos, it was like, OK, this is either going to be a color book or a black-and-white book. I already had most of my black-and-white archived in a way it needed to be archived, so we went with black and white.
“The brain doesn’t have to go back and forth on what it’s taking in, on the sensory level, in the way that it would if there were both color and black-and-white photos,” Willis said.
The images are arranged as a nonverbal journey through Columbus.
“I wanted there to be a nice flow, fluid in the way that it breaks up quadrants of Columbus. So: portrait, landscape, abstract. It gives you a narrative form that people can pick up on, that guides you through the photos as a story,” Willis said.
The sweet goodness of maple syrup:Here’s where to learn about and sample it
In addition to working on the book, Willis has been busy in a variety of endeavors, including: shows at the Columbus College of Art & Design and 934 Gallery; producing a campaign for Apple featuring Columbus artist Counterfeit Madison; working as a cinematographer for the short documentary “They Won’t Call It Murder,” which was shown at the Unorthdocs Documentary Film Festival at the Wexner Center for the Arts; and, with two friends, opening Parable Coffee, a pop-up shop at Comune on Parsons Avenue.
Otherwise, Willis said, “I’m just trying to hone my craft. I’m working on archiving my color photos and starting to share some of those. I’m trying to learn some of the more intricate parts of film processing and printing. I would like to teach the people around me how to do that stuff. I feel like a lot of that isn’t very accessible.”
Willis continues to use photography as a means to explore the city.
“Ultimately, it’s a mix of all the things that I love and all the things that I’m curious about and all the things that I want to change in Columbus. That’s what the photos reflect. All the things that I want to change, and the things that I want to preserve.”
At a glance
Copies of the book are available for $60 at Prologue Bookshop, 841 N. High St. Willis will be available at a book-release party at 934 Gallery, 934 Cleveland Ave. on March 24, time to be announced.
Read More: Columbus photographer Benjamin Willis releases book of community images