Eleanor Bennett
INTERVIEW
Gold Dust’s prize-winning photographer is interviewed by David Gardiner...
Eleanor Leonne Bennett introduced herself to Gold Dust when she was 14, with the offer of cover art and bespoke photographic images tailored to fit specific stories and poems. We gratefully accepted her offer, and have been the beneficiaries of her talent and generosity ever since for artwork in the magazine itself and our occasional Gold Dust Special publications, like our poetry anthology Past, Present and Future and our book of short plays, Six of the Best. Still only 17, Eleanor has achieved as much competition success and publication as many professional adult artists manage in a lifetime. The list is too long even to summarise here, but you can find all the details of her career on her personal website at:
eleanorleonnebennett.com
You were unusually young when you started entering photographic competitions. Did you know from a very young age that a photographic or artistic career was what you wanted? I have always been a creative and competitive person.
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I always wanted to become an artist, in which genre has changed often in my mind since the age of 7. Do you find yourself composing pictures as you live your ordinary life and look around you, like those film directors who claim to perceive their day-to-day life as a series of ‘takes’ and live in an on-going movie? When I take a picture I’m normally thinking about what someone else will see in my image. I don’t think my life is interesting enough to make up a movie frame by frame. I like to deceive and make images that the viewer has to interpret, especially with my abstracts. Often I don’t even want people to think it is the same artist taking them all. I am always taking images of normal things surrounding me, but they don’t add to my biography. I want them to appeal to everyone who sees them. What do you consider your greatest accomplishments in art and photography so far? Becoming the Young Environmental Photographer of the Year. I’ve dreamed of that for so long it doesn’t