Roloff (Wilfred Roy) Beny (1924, Medicine Hat, Alberta–1984, Rome)

With Birds in Flight, Straits of Juan de Fuca, Roloff Beny (1924–1984) offers an unabashedly aesthetic and romantic view of the Canadian wilderness, depicting a dozen abstracted white and black shapes, barely visible as soaring birds, that fill the expanse of open sky above a long line of mountaintops. The intentionally iconic image became part of an important national moment during the centennial celebrations of 1967 when it appeared in the book To Everything There Is a Season: Roloff Beny in Canada. The federal government selected this collection of Beny’s views of the nation as the official gift for the heads of state who visited Canada as the country commemorated one hundred years since Confederation.

Raised in Alberta, Beny moved east to study art at the University of Toronto, where he replaced Wilfred, his given name, with Roloff, his mother’s maiden name. He found early success as an abstract artist before shifting to photography. Drawn to the history and cultural vibrancy of postwar Europe, Beny moved to Rome in 1957 and befriended luminaries like Peggy Guggenheim and Federico Fellini. His first books in the 1950s and early 1960s focused on the architecture, art, and ruins of the classical Mediterranean and were published using the rotogravure printing process, which rendered rich, deep shades of black and white.

He became well known for his glamorous portraits and dramatic landscapes, and the romantic, idealized vision he created in his highly manipulated photographs endeared him to a disparate array of national leaders. Not only was Beny’s work showcased for the Canadian centennial, but India marked the hundredth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth in 1969 with a book of the artist’s photographs titled India.  Beny undertook numerous commissions for major magazines and published fifteen books in his lifetime.