When El Camino College student Raphael Richardson first walked into his Photo 106 class at the start of the fall 2022 semester, he thought he had it in the bag.
After all, he had been working as a freelance photographer, covering breaking news and emergencies in the South Bay.
“I was a hothead in that class,” Richardson, 24, said. “I used to have this whole thing like, ‘oh, I don’t need this class. I already got everything there is because I’ve been doing it for years.”
Then one day, his photojournalism instructor, Chuck Bennett, pulled him aside for a talk.
“Hey, watchya doing?” Bennett said. “There’s always something to learn. You’re taking this class because you need to learn, there’s stuff that you don’t know about.”
That advice was one of the many ways Bennett helped his students achieve their potential as photographers.
Bennett, 60, the former, longtime photo editor for the Daily Breeze and a former photojournalism professor at ECC, died on Aug. 20 after a two and a half year battle with pancreatic cancer.
He leaves behind his wife Denise and their sons Chuck, 28, and James, 23.
Bennett’s decades-long career established him firmly in Southern California’s news community.
Born in Inglewood and raised in Poway, a city near San Diego, Bennett’s career took him to sporting events, political conventions and even the Academy Awards.
He had a stint working on the East Coast in the 1990s, but his base was always in Southern California.
“He’s been a fixture in this area, not just news-wise but in the community for the majority of his life,” El Camino College photojournalism professor Nguyet Thomas said.
One of his last assignments was shooting the 2025 Long Beach Grand Prix in April.
After working for Newsday in New York, where he started in the early 1990s, Bennett and his wife returned to the South Bay in 1997, where he worked for the Daily Breeze and contributed to other publications, including the Press-Telegram.
Being laid off with five other members of the Daily Breeze’s eight-member photo staff in 2018 — a mass layoff that would affect a total of 35 people across 11 Southern California New Group publications — didn’t stop Bennett’s love of photography.
“He still continued to freelance as a photographer for the paper,” Bennett’s longtime friend and fellow photographer Scott Varley said.
Bennett also flexed his skills as a travel photographer. First in 2016, he would spend weeks capturing the lush tropical islands of Fiji and French Polynesia.
In fall 2022, Bennett embarked on a new assignment: teaching photojournalism at ECC.
While there for one semester, he helped shape a new generation of photographers, including Richardson, who went on to become a photo editor for The Union student newspaper and is a freelance contributor for the Daily Breeze.
He mentored students interested in working in photojournalism by connecting them with professionals in the industry and helping them find jobs.
“He had such a wealth of knowledge in photojournalism, both on the professional side and the networking side,” Thomas said.
Bennett would bring guest speakers, such as Varley, drawn from almost 40 years of experience in the field.
Although his time teaching at ECC was brief, his one semester left a lasting impact on his students.
“He taught us what good photos looked like, and that was something that kind of really stuck with me, especially seeing his work,” Ethan Cohen, who graduated from ECC’s journalism program in 2023, said.
Cohen is currently the photo assistant editor for The Current student newspaper at California State University, Long Beach.
Bennett had also been a student at CSU Long Beach, graduating in 1989.
“He had us do a lot of unorthodox assignments, but they were some of the best,” Cohen said.
For one assignment, Bennett showed his students how to shoot streaks of light at creative angles before sending them out to capture panning shots of the lights at night.
“After that [class], that is why I started really looking at different aspects of photography. He really brought in my perspective,” Richardson said.
