Rare photos of chess great Bobby Fischer on display at Sundance Film Fest

Chess blog for latest news and trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2011

Harry Benson with a photograph of Bobby Fischer in a pool and a picture of him nuzzling a horse.

Hello everyone,

The New York Times has just written about a special exhibition of rare photos of chess great Bobby Fischer. The article says when Liz Garbus began researching her documentary “Bobby Fischer Against the World,” which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, she contacted the photographer Harry Benson because Benson had covered the 1972 world championship match between Fischer and Boris Spassky for Life magazine.

Our www.chessblog.com post on the Sundance Film Festival can be read here.

Benson originally became famous for his photographs of the Beatles during their first American tour. Garbus hoped that she might be able to use some of the photographs for the film.

It turned out that Benson had more than just a few photographs from the match. He had taken hundreds of photographs of Fischer, including many on other occasions. Most of the photographs had never been published.

Now, the World Chess Hall of Fame and Museum, which is moving in September to St. Louis from its current home in Miami, has organized an exhibition during the Sundance Film Festival of some of Benson’s photographs. There are plans to move the exhibition to New York City this summer when Garbus’s film is broadcast on HBO. Eventually, the collection may end up at the new museum in St. Louis.

You can see more photographs and read the rest of the article here.

There is also a nice article on Frank Brody's book Endgame that is on Fischer. You can read this article here.

From Alexandra Kosteniuk's
www.chessblog.com
Also see her personal blog at
www.chessqueen.com