Daily News | Neil Benson, prolific photographer, recycling pioneer, salvage artist, and community activist, has died at 69
“It’s a sin to waste,” Mr. Benson told The Inquirer in 1993. “That’s the underlying theory of dumpster divers. It’s against natural law to landfill usable items.” His motto was “Trash is simply a failure of imagination.”
Over the years, Mr. Benson collected beat-up aluminum cookware, neon signs, Hawaiian shirts, rotary telephones, old answering machines, padlocks, cigar boxes, record players, political buttons, Boy Scout patches, metal lunch boxes, abandoned cars, and much more that he kept, sold, or recycled into artwork that he and the divers display for viewing and sale at local exhibitions.
By 2011, Mr. Benson’s Center City home was so full that his family and friends staged a friendly and welcomed clear-out intervention. “I’m in a position where I don’t have stuff anymore,” heBorn March 9, 1953, in Philadelphia, Neil Samuel Benson grew up in Logan, collected stamps as a boy, and graduated from Olney High School. He attended Philadelphia College of Art, now University of the Arts, for a while and later honed his photographic skills at Temple University.
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