Dr Arthur David "Kin" Bensusan was born in Johannesburg in 1921. The son of a physician, he schooled at St John's College, Johannesburg and then commenced medical studies at Witwatersrand University. He joined the South African Air Force at the outbreak of World War II and served in North Africa and Italy as an aerial photographer, having developed a great interest in photography at an early age.
In 1954, he founded the Photographic Society of Southern Africa. He received a number of awards and became a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and Photographic Society of America. He was invited to join the London Salon, an elite group of the world’s top photographers.
He also applied his photographic expertise to medicine and in the 1960’s he invented the world’s first instantaneous X-ray, which allowed for the immediate diagnosis of people involved in accidents.
Dr Bensusan was a world-renowned authority on the history of photography and one of the world’s foremost collectors of vintage photographs and equipment. His collection became the basis of the Bensusan Museum and Library of Photography in Johannesburg, which he founded in 1969. It is now recognised as one of the finest photography museums in the world.
In 1973 he became Mayor of Johannesburg, as well as publishing numerous books on photography and producing movies which won awards at Cannes. He died in 2007, aged 85 but remains one of the best-known African photographers of all time.