Benedict J. Fernandez III was the founding chair of the Parsons School of Design Photography Department from 1981 until he stepped down in 1992.Fernandez was born in 1936 in Harlem. After Alexey Brodovitch asked him to join Brodovitch's Design Laboratory in 1963, Fernandez accepted a job as a darkroom attendant at Parsons School of Design and built up a photography, which was attached to Communication Design until it became an independent department. Simultaneously, he ran the Photo Film Workshop, a photography session for low-income youth that met in the basement of the Public Theater. In his professional career, Fernandez is recognized as a seminal photographer of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the anti-Vietnam War protest movement. He has photographed subjects as diverse as biker gangs and the architecture of Ellis Island. After leaving Parsons, he founded the Hoboken Almanac of Photography and the Almanac Gallery in Hoboken, New Jersey, and served as a senior fellow at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, DC. He also served as a fellow to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and Senior Fulbright Research Fellow, and is the recipient of both a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the MoMA, and many other prestigious institutions.