Ben Shahn Article

The Smithsonian Institution
The Politics of Media: Painting and Photography in the Art of Ben Shahn
Author(s): Laura Katzman
Source: American Art, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 60-87
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3109135 .
Accessed: 21/09/2014 19:06
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
The University of Chicago Press, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Smithsonian Institution are
collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Art.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 146.95.253.17 on Sun, 21 Sep 2014 19:06:56 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Politics of Media
Painting
and
Photography
in the Art of Ben Shahn
In 1947 Ben Shahn
(1898-1969)
was
given
his first
retrospective
exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA)
in New
York. This exhibition
helped
to establish
him as one of the most
popular figurative
painters
of his
generation
and affirmed a
commitment to his work at a time when
the museum was
championing mostly
European
abstract modes of
painting. James
Thrall
Soby,
the curator of the
exhibit,
planned
to show a
representative
selection
of Shahn's work in a
variety
of media,
including paintings, drawings, posters,
and mural studies-but not
necessarily
photographs.
In
fact,
Soby expressed
serious concern about
having any
of
Shahn's
photographs
in the exhibition
and
questioned
how to deal with them in
the
catalogue.
In a letter to Shahn about
his
text, which
was,
significantly,
the first
major essay
on Shahn's
work,
Soby
wrote:
I'll
try
to work out the
photography
business
carefully
and
accurately.
As a matter
offact,
I've worried about the latter
part
all
along.
There is a
tendency
to link
yourpaintingfar
too
closely
to
photography,
as in the U.S.
Camera article and numerous reviews, and
I tried to
qualify
whatever I said
aboutyour
photography by pointing
out how
different
the
paintings
are in
final conception
and
spirit.
But
I'llgo
over it
again
with
afine
tooth comb. It's
important.'
Soby
also did not
reproduce
Shahn's
photographs
in a
special supplement
of
the MoMA Bulletin devoted to his
exhibition. He made a
general
reference
to them, but he did not list them
sepa-
rately
or
give
them individual titles. He
even took the
liberty
to halt an article that
the New York Times
magazine
section
wanted to do on Shahn's
painting
and
photography. Clearing
it with Shahn after
the fact,
Soby
wrote:
I vetoed the idea on the
theory
that this
would turn into another U.S. Camera
article, which
you
hadn't liked-nor I
Hope
this was the
right thing
to do, even
though
it
may
mean
they
won't do the
article at all.
They've published
a lot
of
bad
articles in that section,
including many
attacks on modern art, and
Ifelt
that we
shouldn't take a chance,
particularly
in view
ofyour
reluctance to have
any photos
in the
show at all.2
Although
some
photographs
were in fact
included in the exhibition,
they
were
relegated
to the end of the show and not
integrated
with the
paintings
to which
they
related.
What was it that so worried
Soby
and
Shahn about the
photographs?
How can
we understand their reluctance to exhibit
them? Their concerns would at first seem
61 American Art
Laura Katzman
Photographer's
Window
(detail),
1939.
Tempera
on board, 24 x 32 1/4
in. Hood Museum of Art,
Dartmouth
College,
Hanover, New
Hampshire, Bequest
of the Estate of
Lawrence Richmond, Class of 1930
0
0
0 - S
a
*l
0
a
__
a *
linked to the fact that
photography
was
not
yet fully accepted
as an art
form,
despite
efforts made earlier in the
century by
Alfred
Stieglitz. By
the 1930s a
lively community
of art
photographers
existed in New
York,
and
photography
was exhibited and even
collected
by
a few
galleries
like
Julien Levy
and
Delphic
Studios. Still,
these
galleries
could not survive on the sale of
photo-
graphs
alone,
nor could
photographers
support
themselves outside the commercial
world. In this
country,
a form of
straight
or
documentary photography prevailed
throughout
the
Depression
and World
War II. In
fact,
some have claimed that the
issue of whether
photography
was art was a
remote one
during
this
period,
as it served
the more
urgent
function of
recording
the
harsh conditions of the
day.3
Given this
popular conception
of
photography,
a
painter's
use of
photographs
would have
been
perceived
as
compromising
creative
imagination and-especially
for artists who
aspired
to
"realism"-succumbing
to a
form of
cheating.
Since the invention of
the medium,
photography's
indexical
connection to the material world was seen
as
being
at odds with the transcendent
status of art.
Soby's
concern, then,
stemmed from
the
uncomfortably
close connection
between Shahn's
paintings
and
photographs
and from his belief that
public knowledge
of the
photographic
sources of
paintings
could diminish the
paintings'
aesthetic or
market value or, worse, both. This was
certainly
the attitude of Shahn's dealer,
Edith
Halpert,
who had refused to exhibit
Charles Sheeler's
paintings
and
photo-
graphs together
in her Downtown
Gallery, deliberately stifling public
exposure
of his
photography.
As Diane
Tepfer
has
suggested, Halpert
feared that
Sheeler's
photographs
would
eclipse
his
paintings
and
thereby
reorient his
reputa-
tion as a
painter
that she had
helped
construct. The close
relationship
between
the two media would allow critics and
collectors to
judge
his
paintings
as
merely
photographic,
an added hindrance to sales
during
the Great
Depression.4
Halpert
never showed Shahn's
paint-
ings
and
photographs together
and was
probably
relieved that he didn't
pursue
photography
to the same
degree
that
Sheeler did. In later
years
she
expressed
some concern about the
relationship
between the two media in Shahn's work.
She seems to have either
possessed
little
knowledge
of the extensiveness of his use
of
photographs
or
downplayed
what she
did know,
asserting
that Shahn
always
personalized
and altered
photographs
when
appropriating
them for his
paint-
ings.5
At the time of his first
retrospective
of
photographs
in
1969,
shortly
after the
artist's death, Bernarda
Bryson
Shahn,
his
widow,
also worried about the relation-
ship
between his
paintings
and
photo-
graphs.
She
suggested
that
knowledge
of
such connections would,
in the
public's
eye,
minimize Shahn's seriousness as both
a
photographer
and
painter
as well as his
respect
for
photographs
or
paintings
as
independent
art forms.6
To
protect
the
autonomy, integrity,
and
perceived originality
of Shahn's
paintings
and
photographs,
some critics
and
biographers
have felt
compelled
to
make distinctions between the two media
at different
points
in his career. When
biographers
do
acknowledge
the interrela-
tionships, they usually qualify
them in
some
way,
often with the claim that the
photographs
and the
paintings
each stand
on their own.7 Also,
critics tend to make
qualitative judgments
about the two
media,
claiming
that Shahn was a better
painter
than
photographer
or vice versa.
This
tendency
was evident in reviews of
the 1947 MoMA exhibition. Photo
historian
Nancy
Newhall,
in
explaining
why
Shahn was a better
painter
than
photographer,
wrote:
In his
photographs
[Shahn]
does not work
for
the most
expressive
moment; he
snaps
an
interesting
but
incomplete
idea.... His
62 Winter 1993
painting
is to him what the climax
of
a
series is to the miniaturist.
Critic Clement
Greenberg
asserted
just
the
opposite,
that Shahn was "more
naturally
a
photographer
than
painter,
feels
only
black and white, and is surest of
himself when he orients his
picture
in
terms of dark and
light." Photography,
Greenberg
claimed, was
responsible
for
Shahn's best work in
painting:
"It was the
monocular
photograph,
with its sudden
telescoping
of
planes,
its
abrupt leaps
Since the invention
of
the me-
dium,
photography's
indexical
connection to the material world
was seen as
being
at odds with
the transcendent status
of
art.
from solid
foreground
to flat distance, ...
which remains
responsible
for most of
[Shahn's]
successful
pictures."8
Other reviewers of the MoMA show
commented on the
negative
effect of
photography
on Shahn's
art,
stating
that
his
photography
hindered his art, slowed
his
development
as a
painter,
or made his
work look mechanical. These views were
not
merely personal responses
to formal
qualities
found in Shahn's
paintings
and
photographs. They
were
judgments
informed
by
biases
particular
to the
time,
namely
modernism's insistence on the
separation
of
painting
and
photography
and on the
autonomous, distinct, self-
generating
aesthetic of each
medium, and
the concern over
upsetting
traditional
media boundaries. These biases have
contributed in
part
to
why
so little is
known
today
about the
relationship
between
painting
and
photography
in the
early part
of the twentieth
century.9
Oddly enough,
such
judgments
are not
generally
made about Shahn's work in
other media that relate to his
paintings.
In
fact, his murals,
graphics,
and
drawings
have been seen as
proof
of his
versatility
and talent. This
suggests
that it was
photography
in
particular
that caused
problems
for critics. But it is worth
noting
that Newhall and
Greenberg
were
promoting
different causes.
Newhall, as a
writer for Photo Notes, the
journal
of the
Photo
League,
a
left-wing organization
devoted to the
practice
and
teaching
of
socially
concerned
photography,
was
espousing
the cause of
photography.
She
may
have called Shahn a better
painter
because his dismissals of
technique
and
his
self-taught experience
rendered
photography easy,
an attitude that
would have invalidated the
pedagogical
foundation of the Photo
League
school.
Greenberg's
comment that Shahn was a
better
photographer
was, in effect, as
Frances Pohl has noted, a
double-edged
compliment,
because at the time Shahn
wanted "to distance
[his]
paintings
from
his
photographs, giving primacy
to the
former." But
Greenberg's
claim was
also a
way
to criticize Shahn's social
realist
painting
as "not
important,
. . .
essentially
beside the
point
as far as
ambitious
present-day painting
is con-
cerned"-which for
Greenberg
meant
abstraction.'?
This kind of media
promotion
has
occurred
blatantly
in discussions about
one of Shahn's most celebrated
paintings,
Handball
(fig.
1),
and the
photograph
to
which it relates
(fig.
2).
Soby,
for ex-
ample,
in a letter to Shahn at the time of
the 1947 MoMA
exhibit, noted how
different the
painting
and
photograph
are
in
conception:
"I read one review which
seemed to claim that Handballwas
directly
based on
your photograph
of the
scene, whereas the
opposite
seems to me
true." Since
Soby
wanted to
promote
Shahn as an easel
painter,
he claimed that
Shahn's
photography
stemmed from "the
compulsion
of a
painter's
inner vision"
and that
drawing
was the "backbone of
63 American Art
1 Handball, 1939.
Tempera
on
paper
over
composition
board, 22 34 x 31 /4.
Collection, The Museum of Modern
Art, New York,
Abby
Aldrich
Rockefeller Fund
2 New York
City,
ca. 1933. Gelatin
silver
print,
7 x 9 5/8 in.
Fogg
Art
Museum, Harvard
University,
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Gift of
Mrs. Bernarda B. Shahn
his art."
Soby's
attitude toward the
photographs
is
especially
curious,
given
that he himself had been an amateur
photographer.
He took
special
interest in
the
documentary
work of Walker Evans,
under whom he had
apprenticed
in the
1930s. Later,
he even wrote about Evans
for the
Saturday
Review on
request by
MoMA,
the first museum in the United
States to have a bona fide
department
of
photography.1"
In 1966 the former director of this
very
department, John Szarkowski,
com-
mented on the
similarity
between Shahn's
painting
Handballand the
photograph
that
inspired
it: "It is not remarkable that
[Shahn's]
painting
based
upon
[the
photograph]
resembles it so
closely,
for to
what
purpose
would he
change
it?"
Szarkowski was
promoting photography
as a
unique entity existing
within its own
distinct aesthetic
realm;
in his
logic,
to use
a
photograph
as a
study
or
prop
for
something
else would
necessarily
diminish
its
authority, completeness,
and au-
tonomy.
But Szarkowski's attitude must
also be seen in
light
of MoMA's
larger
construction of a formalist art
history
of
photography
that has
neglected
the social
and
political
uses and contexts of the
photographs
in its collections.12
Another
possible
reason
why
Shahn's
photographs
were not exhibited in
large
number or in relation to his
paintings
in
1947 is that the
type
of
photography
he
had
practiced
for the New Deal's Resettle-
ment Administration/Farm
Security
Administration
(RA/FSA)
became
politically suspect
after World War II.
Even
during
the
organization's heyday,
FSA
photographs
were attacked as
Communist
propaganda by
conservative
congressmen
who
recognized
that
images
of down-and-out Americans could be
used to criticize the
capitalist system
or
highlight
the
hypocrisy
of democratic
ideals. Shahn's
paintings
and sometimes
even his
photographs
were
among
those
singled
out in
congressional
records for
their
hard-hitting messages,
irreverent
overtones,
or
allegedly
"red" associations.
In the mid to late 1940s Shahn was under
attack for his radical
posters
done for the
Congress
of Industrial
Organizations
(CIO);
his contribution to the
experimental
State
Department
exhibition of
1946, which
was the
subject
of an anti-Communist
assault;
and for his
government
mural on
64 Winter 1993
Social
Security (1940-42, Wilbur
J.
Cohen Federal
Building, Washington,
D.C.),
which was threatened with
destruction. Therefore,
downplaying
his
New Deal
photographs might
have been
Soby's way
of
averting yet
more
potential
controversy
in the
increasingly oppressive
political
climate of
postwar
America.
Additionally,
Shahn's
photographs
of
destitute Americans
may
not have fit the
image
of him that MoMA
encouraged
at
the time-that of an American artist and
cold-war liberal whose
universalizing
work
appealed
to members of both the
political
Left and
Right.13
Artist as
Photographer
These situations have created confusion
and
perpetuated
misinformation about
Shahn's art.
They explain
in
part
how a
certain
image
of Shahn has been
pro-
moted and
why
we have such
fragmentary
knowledge
of his
photography beyond
the
FSA work housed in
public
collections,
portions
of which have been
reproduced
and celebrated. But these circumstances
should also
explain why
we know so little
about the actual role of
photography
in
Shahn's art. When writers do
compare
his
paintings
and
photographs, they
often do
so in a limited
way,
either
proving
that a
certain
photograph inspired
a certain
painting
(the
discovery
of the source
photograph being
an end in itself) or
briefly describing
and
summarizing
his
usage
with
little, if
any, analysis
of how
the interaction between the two media
affects the
meaning
of
specific
works.
Shahn himself
perpetuated
this situation
in the
way
he
spoke
about his
photography.
Shahn used
photography
in
ways
more
complex
than either scholars or he himself
have noted. In
actuality,
the interaction of
the two media in his work raised some
very
involved issues. The debates concern-
ing
the
problematic relationship
between
painting
and
photography
were
obviously
not new to the 1930s. But what was the
state of the debate at the time that Shahn
was
working?
And how did his work
engage
in or
respond
to these issues?
These
questions
can be considered
by
first
looking
at Shahn's
relationship
to
photog-
raphy
and how he situated himself in the
photography
world of his time, then
by
demonstrating
how several
paintings
that
take
photography
as their
subject
address
the
relationship
between
painting
and
photography, problems
of artistic
repre-
sentation, and the nature of the documen-
tary expression
that was so central to New
Deal culture.
Shahn's involvement with
photography
is not
easy
to describe because he took
more
photographs
than is
generally
known. From anecdotal accounts we
know that he
gained
basic technical
knowledge
from Walker Evans, with
whom he shared a studio in Greenwich
Village
in the
early
1930s.
Equipped
with
a used Leica
(one of the most
popular
thirty-five-millimeter
miniature cameras
of the
day)
that he had obtained from his
brother, Shahn
enjoyed
a brief stint as a
street
photographer, snapping pictures
of
immigrants, unemployed
workers,
homeless
people
on the Lower East Side
and other
parts
of
Manhattan, and
prisoners
in
upstate
New York. He also
took
many photographs
of artists' strikes
and
parades;
in fact, Shahn embraced
photography
at the time of his most active
involvement in radical
politics.
Shahn claimed that he used
photogra-
phy
as a
sketchpad
for
taking
notes for
future
paintings, seeing
the camera as
more efficient than the
pencil
for
captur-
ing
movement and details from which he
could
glean
broad
generalizations.
While
there is much truth to this, such a literal
statement can
preclude
an
understanding
of the more critical
ways photography
figured
in his work.
Photography
func-
tioned for
Shahn,
in
part,
as a tool for
examining
ethnic and racial
groups
and
relations between these
groups,
as is
65 American Art
3 Untitled, New York
City,
ca.
1933-34. Gelatin silver
print,
5 7/8 x
8 7/8 in.
Fogg
Art Museum, Harvard
University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts,
Gift of Mrs. Bernarda B. Shahn
4 Creole
Trapper's
Children,
Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana,
1935.
Photograph,
8 x 10 in.
Library
of
Congress,
Prints and
Photographs
Division, Washington,
D.C.
5 Self-Portrait with
Angle
Viewfinder,
ca. 1939.
Drawing.
Private collection
6 Fenno
Jacobs, photograph
of
amateur minicam user, ca. 1936.
Reproduced
in "The U.S. Minicam
Boom," Fortune 14
(October 1936)
evident in his
photograph
of a Greek
American, an Italian American, and an
African American from circa 1933-34
(fig.
3).
Here Shahn used the architecture
enclosed within the
picture
frame to
establish
physical
barriers between the
men-barriers
suggestive
of
larger
social
and ethnic divisions.14
From 1935 to 1938 Shahn
photo-
graphed
in a more
professional capacity
for the RA/FSA,
documenting
rural
poverty
and small-town life as
part
of a
propaganda campaign
to
bring
relief to
the nation's farmers. His warm,
spontane-
ous-looking images,
characterized
by
asymmetrical
balance,
compressed space,
and dramatic
cropping, alongside
Walker
Evans's
colder, frontal, and more
formally
constructed
pictures,
have come to
shape
the
way
our culture views
Depression-era
America
(fig.
4).
Shahn took his work for the
govern-
ment
very seriously.
In later
years
he
spoke
about the total involvement he had
felt on the FSA
project
and how his
eye-
opening photographic trips
across the
United States
challenged
his
preconcep-
tions about
oppressed peoples,
enabled
him to
put
art at the service of social
change,
and
helped
him build a collection
of visual materials for future use. But at
the same time Shahn
kept
his distance
from
photography,
as is evident not
only
in his
writings
but also in his art. He
wrote
relatively
little about the
medium,
but when he did, he
downplayed
the
importance
of
technique, privileging
content over
print quality.
He claimed
that he never made a
photograph
for its
own sake but
only
for
documentary
or
communicative
purposes,
and that he was
uninterested in
making
an art of
photog-
raphy.
He
rejected
hierarchies of
media,
asserting
that
images
were
equal
whether
they
were made with the brush or camera.
While in later
years
he was could be
dismissive about his involvement in
photography, asserting
that it was neither
his livelihood nor his
career,
he main-
tained
strong opinions
about the relation-
ship
between
painting
and
photography.15
The
way
in which Shahn
positioned
himself in relation to
photography
is
apparent
in a
very revealing
document of
1959 from MoMA's
photography depart-
ment
requesting
information on his work
for its curatorial files. Shahn answered few
of the
questions
about his
photographs
and even
claimed,
curiously,
that his
photographs
had no exhibition
history.16
Such
posturing
was
expressed
more
graphically
in a line
drawing
of
twenty
years
earlier in which the artist
depicted
himself
using
his Leica camera with a
right-angle
viewfinder,
a mirror attached
to the lens at a
forty-five-degree angle
that
enabled him to
capture
his
subjects
off
guard (fig. 5).
In this
caricature, Shahn's
67 American Art
7 Advertisement for Leica
angle
viewfinder, ca. 1938
eager, forward-leaning
stance,
exaggerat-
edly large body, tiny
feet,
and
open
mouth
express
his
playfulness
and
delight
in
taking photographs
in this
way.
Such
lightheartedness
ran counter to the
seriousness and
intensity
with which
thirty-five-millimeter photography
was
practiced during
the miniature camera
craze of the 1930s
(fig.
6).
According
to
one social historian of the
period,
Frederick Lewis Allen,
during
the
early years of
the
Depression
one
began
to notice, here and there,
young
men
with what
appeared
to be leather-cased
opera glasses slung
about their necks.
They
were the
pioneers of
the camera craze who
had discovered that the Leicas and other
tiny
German cameras, which took
postage-stamp-
size
pictures
capable of enlargement,
combined a
speed,
a
depth offocus,
and an
ability
to do their work in dim
light
which
opened
all sorts
of
new
opportunities
to the
photographer.
The number
of
"candid
camera
"
addicts
grew rapidly
as the
experts
showed how
easily
an executive committee or
a
table-full of night-club patrons might
be
shot
sitting. During
the
eightyears fom
1928 to 1936 the
importation
into America
of
cameras and
parts thereof-chiefly
from
Germany-increased
over
five-fold despite
the
Depression.17
Shahn's
drawing
functions much as the
Leica advertisements functioned in
popular
photo journals
and manuals at the time in
the
way
it
displays
the camera's
special
features-smallness,
compactness,
portability (emphasized by
Shahn's
large
hand),
and
simple design.
The
drawing
plays
on the notion of
"handling
a Leica,"
a
promotional
tactic that
suggested
the
human dimension and user's control over
the camera machine. And much as the ads
promoted
the
right-angle
viewfinder
(fig.
7),
Shahn
cleverly
boasted the effective-
ness of this device in
capturing people
unawares:
By
the time we, the viewers of
the
image, figure
out what he is
doing,
he
has
already snapped
our
picture.
In
depicting
himself
playfully
with the
Leica and
angle
viewfinder, Shahn seemed
to embrace an amateur status.
(Initially
yet unfairly
considered
by many
the
toys
of
amateurs,
minicameras
by
the late 1930s
had
only recently
been taken
seriously
in
professional
circles.)
But what did it mean
to be an amateur
photographer
in the
1930s? The advent of miniature cameras
spawned
a new breed of amateurs
gener-
ally
known as "serious amateurs,"
gadge-
teers,
or minicamers,
distinguished
from
earlier
snapshooters by
their dedication to
technical matters,
equipment,
and
experimentation.
Shahn disliked this
obsession with how, as
opposed
to
why,
pictures
were taken. His antitechnical
stance was evident in his aversion to
flashes, filters,
exposure
meters,
and
camera clubs-he
provided
at least one
photo journal
with
misleading
technical
information to
accompany
his
published
photographs-and
the irreverent
delight
he took in non-"art"
photographs,
such as
newspaper pictures.18
While Shahn
rejected
the technical
focus of "serious amateurs," he neverthe-
less embraced other
aspects
of an amateur
status that would allow him the freedom
to
experiment.
If his
photographs
turned
out
poorly,
he had an excuse;
if
they
turned
out well, he could attribute their success
to his natural talent rather than to technical
know-how or
sophisticated equipment.
Colin Westerbeck has
argued persuasively
that Shahn was not restricted
by
the
compunctions
of a
professional.
That
68 Winter 1993
photography
was
secondary
to his
paint-
ing,
in Westerbeck's view, accounts for
the
"originality"
of his
photographs,
while
his uninvolved
ego-his willingness
to
try
anything
and to fail-contributed to his
great output
and
facility
in
photography.19
Behind Shahn's irreverence about
technique,
however, lurked the
probabil-
ity
that he cared more than he let on. He
printed, dodged, enlarged, cropped,
mounted, and titled
many
of his own
photographs
and became a
good
techni-
cian in
spite
of himself. In the
early years
of the RA/FSA, he even insisted on
printing
his own material as models for the
government printers.
But Shahn's com-
mitment to
photography
should not be
exaggerated
because he
mostly
didn 't care
about
technique,
and he lost
many
potentially powerful pictures
because he
didn't use
equipment appropriate
for
certain
low-light
situations. He even refused
to learn more than he needed to know to
get by.
What is at issue here is not
whether or how much Shahn cared about
technical
matters, but how his attitude-his
dismissals and his desire not to make an
art of
photography-has prevented
us
from
looking
more
closely
at his
work,
and how it became for the artist a kind of
self-conscious stance in and of itself.20
The
angle
viewfinder
drawing,
for
example,
was
inspired by staged photo-
graphs
of Shahn from circa 1939
(fig.
8),
and as one of the few well-known
images
of himself as a
photographer,
it became
closely
identified with his
photographic
persona. Twenty years
after such
photo-
graphs
were taken
(and,
significantly,
at
the time of his last
major photographic
activity),
similar
photographs
were
staged
during
a
trip
to
Japan.
Pictured
playfully
with camera cases and binoculars
slung
around his neck and a souvenir
poster
in
hand that reads "tell me about
Japan" (fig.
9), Shahn at once
acknowledged
and
poked
fun at the tourist's vision-a vision
mediated
by
lenses,
preconceived
notions
of other
cultures, and desires to take
8 Unknown
photographer,
Ben
Shahn with Leica and
angle
viewfinder, ca. 1939.
Photograph,
8 1/2 11 in. Collection of Mrs.
Bernarda B. Shahn, Roosevelt, New
Jersey
9 Unknown
photographer,
Ben
Shahn with Leica in
Japan,
ca.
1960. Polaroid
photograph,
2 /2 x
3 1/4 in. Collection of Mrs. Bernarda
B. Shahn, Roosevelt, New
Jersey
69 American Art
home "views." Shahn's tourist identifica-
tion is
yet
another
example
of how in later
years
he tended to resist a serious,
profes-
sional association with
photography.21
Shahn's "Covert" Use of
Photographs
Shahn's
deep
involvement with
photogra-
phy
is further confirmed
by
the
photograph
files he maintained as
part
of his visual
reference
library,
files he would refer to
when he needed a
picture
of,
say,
a miner,
a
child,
a
building,
or a
politician.
That
these files have
only recently
come to
light suggests
the Shahn estate's concern
over
public exposure
of the artist's use
of
photography.
It also underscores
photography's
entrance into museums
and its
greater public acceptance
as an aid
in the artistic
process.22
Shahn's files indicate the
great
extent
to which he used his own
photographs
as
well as those of others,
both known and
anonymous.
The
majority
of the
photo-
graphs
were
newspaper
and
magazine
clippings
of the thirties and forties,
but
they
also came from
government
bureaus
and news
agencies,
which sent them to
him unsolicited or in
response
to his
request
when he needed them for a
particular project
or
specific
commission.
Many
of the
newspaper photos-often
with
captions
retained-feature
political
figures
or events.
Photography
and
politics
are thus
inextricably
linked in this archive.
Shahn's files reflect the
proliferation
in
the mid-thirties of
big picture magazines,
with their
predominance
of
image
over
text,
and
suggest
Shahn's awareness of
how one
photograph
could be used in
many
different
ways
and how its
meaning
was
contingent upon
its context. A
photograph
of a labor
dispute
at the Ford
plant
in 1937,
for
example, appears
twice
in the files under the
headings
"strikes
and
police"
and "conventions,"
the latter
suggesting
the relevance of labor union
issues to
political campaigns
at the time.
Shahn used
seemingly
innocuous
photographs
to make more overt social
commentary
in
painting,
as in Carnival
(fig.
10), inspired by
his own
photographs
of a
game operator (fig.
11),
an amuse-
ment ride,
and a
couple
at an Ohio
carnival in 1938.
Juxtaposed
and trans-
formed in the
painting
(the
game operator
becomes a sadder,
more
sympathy-
evoking person),
these
images helped
70 Winter 1993
12 Brothers, 1946.
Tempera
on
paper
mounted on fiberboard, 38 5/8 x 26 in.
Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture
Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift
of
Joseph
H. Hirshhorn Foundation
13 Unknown
photographer, Klooga
death
camp prisoner,
ca. 1944.
Radiophoto, reproduced
in
Information
Bulletin,
Embassy of
USSR,
in Ben Shahn
Papers,
Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Shahn
suggest
the
disparity
between the
haves and have-nots-that the
play
of
some
depends
on the work of others.
Conversely,
he also used
very politically
charged photographs, watering
down
their
implications
to make more
general-
ized,
universal
images,
as in Brothers
(fig.
12),
a
painting
that borrowed from a
news
photograph
of a survivor of the
Klooga
death
camp
in Eastern
Europe
(fig.
13).
Art historian Ziva Amishai-Maisels has
shown how Shahn used
photographs
of
Holocaust victims as the basis of his
wartime and
postwar paintings, hiding
their
original meanings
behind more
general
antiwar
messages
or
responses
to
the
sufferings
of the
Poles, Danes, Czechs,
and French.
Linking
this covert
usage
to
his
Jewish heritage,
she states that his
"complex expression
of his ethnic
identity
reveals a
struggle
between his need for
self-identification as a
Jew
and his fears of
being
labelled
parochial,"
which Shahn
felt "would
impinge upon
his
identity
as
an American and as a 'rational humanist.'"
Thus
might
be
explained
his simultaneous
attraction and ambivalence towards his
Jewish identity
at a time of
rampant
anti-
Semitism.23
While it is
tempting
to read Shahn's
so-called covert use of Holocaust
photo-
graphs
in an ethnic
context,
it was
typical
of the
way
he used most
photographs
for
his
painting
and mural work
throughout
the thirties and forties. An
example
is his
photograph
of a blind street musician
(ca.
1933-34,
Fogg
Art
Museum)
and its
related
painting,
BlindAccordion
Player
(1945,
Neuberger
Museum, Purchase,
New
York).
Shahn abstracted from the
photograph,
eliminated extraneous
detail,
decontextualized and
enlarged
the
figure,
and
compressed
the
space, thereby
creating
a more
surreal, universal state-
ment about the human condition.
This
universalizing tendency
was not
particular
to Shahn. Other
political
realists of his
generation,
such as William
Gropper
and
Philip Evergood,
moved
in the mid-1940s from
topical imagery
to an
allegorical language
that addressed
broader, more universal issues and
appealed
to a wider audience. This
pictorial change
was also a
response
to
criticisms of art as a
propagandistic
tool: it
was a
way
for these artists to affirm the
status of their work as
"high"
art that
transcended mere
propaganda.24
If Shahn's use of
photographs
was not
always
obvious
during
the war
years,
he
never
verbally
denied his reliance
upon
them. From the late 1930s on, he
openly
71 American Art
14
Photographer's
Window, 1939.
Tempera
on board, 24 x 32 1/4 in. Hood Museum of
Art, Dartmouth
College,
Hanover, New
Hampshire, Bequest
of the Estate of Lawrence
Richmond, Class of 1930
15 Untitled, New York
City,
1936. Gelatin
silver
print,
7 7/8 x 10 in.
Fogg
Art Museum,
Harvard
University, Cambridge,
Massachu-
setts, Gift of Mrs. Bernarda B. Shahn
requested photographs
from
Roy Stryker,
his boss on the FSA
project,
and from
various
government agencies
to use for his
own work. He admitted that
photographs
formed the basis of much of his art from
the late 1930s
through
the mid-1940s.
Later,
in fact, he
expressed
his
annoyance
at the endless debates on the
relationship
between
painting
and
photography
and
hoped they
would come to an end. He
was
apparently quite open
about
showing
his
photo
files to interested individuals,
thereby naturalizing
an artist's use of
photographs
as common studio
parapher-
nalia and tools of the trade.25
What is
curious, however,
is that when
Shahn traced the
origin
of a
photo-
inspired painting,
he
rarely
mentioned the
specific photograph
he used,
implying
that his
experiences
and memories as
they
were recorded
by preparatory drawings
were the seeds of his ideas. Even when he
did
acknowledge
the
photographic
source
of a
painting,
he did not credit the
photographer
or
newspaper
from which it
came.26 These omissions can be
explained
partly by
failed
memory, partly by
his
own awareness of the biases
against using
camera
images,
but
mostly by
the
ubiqui-
tous nature of
photographs
in our
society.
So
thoroughly
do
they
saturate our
culture that
photographs-especially
newspaper photographs-are
considered
to be authorless
public property,
fair
game
to be
freely
used, altered,
manipulated,
and
reproduced.
Photographer's
Window
Shahn used
photographs
in these
ways
throughout
his career. But at crucial
moments in his life he also reflected
upon
photography
itself and issues of
represen-
tation,
as demonstrated in several
paint-
ings
from 1939. This dialectic is
exempli-
fied
by Photographer's
Window
(fig.
14),
which he
painted
the
year
after he re-
signed
from the FSA-a time when
photography
was still
very
much on his
mind.
Photographer's
Window has not
received much attention in the Shahn
literature,
although
one critic in 1976
called it a curious
painting:
"One is never
certain whether Shahn is
portraying
a
literal
transcription
of a real window or an
invented situation."27 The reviewer's
uncertainty might
have been clarified had
he known about the
photograph
from
which the
painting
derives
(fig.
15),
a
photograph
that
provides
clues to the
painting's larger meanings.
The
photograph
(which
has never
been
reproduced) presents
a studio
photographer's
window that Shahn saw
on a New York
City
street three
years
before he made the
painting.
The
image
presents
four rows of
pictures
of
wedding
couples, graduates,
a bar mitzvah
student,
babies, and small children. While most of
the
photographs
are
matted,
some are
more
formally displayed
in
frames,
indicating
a more
expensive option
available at the studio. In the
foreground
lightbulbs
and reflections from the
window
partially
block the face of a child
and a bride, and
light
obliterates two
photographs entirely,
a detail that will be
shown to bear considerable
significance.
The
photographs present formally
dressed
people posed
for momentous
occasions. The
couples
stand in stock
poses,
either
frontally
or at an
angle
with
their heads
slightly
cocked toward each
other.
They
smile ahead or look
wistfully
and
lovingly away
from the camera into
the distance. Some of the
couples appear
with flowers
against backdrops
with arches
that enclose and bathe them in a soft halo
of
light.
The windows
suggest
worlds
beyond
the
loving
shelter of their
union;
staircases
point
to the eternal road of their
joined
lives. The
photographs
of the
children,
interspersed among
those of the
couples
and also adorned with flowers
and shown with studio
props, suggest
more
literally
the future
products
of
marriage.
73 American Art
Why
would Shahn have been inter-
ested in such an
ordinary image? Precisely
because it was so
ordinary.
His interest in
the "common man" had
already
been
demonstrated
by
his Sacco and Vanzetti
series
(1931-32),
Mooney
series
(1932-
33),
and Prohibition
(1933-34)
and Rikers
Island mural studies
(1934).
Such work
was
part
of a
larger
artistic
response
to the
Great
Depression
and
exemplified
efforts
For Shahn the artist, the window
presented
an
opportunity
to
reflect upon
the
practice ofpho-
tography
itself
for
the
very
act
of
photographing
a
photographer's
window
necessarily
established a
relationship
between the
photog-
rapher
and the
pictures
in the
window.
by
the Works
Progress
Administration/
Federal Art
Project
(WPA/FAP)
to record
the lives of rural and small-town folk as a
way
of
fostering
national
pride.
In a
quest
to document what was American about
America and to find a "usable
past,"
artists celebrated their
agrarian
roots in
the rural Midwest. For
Shahn,
this
window would have
represented
a slice of
American life-a window on the world.
Yet this is not
just any
world,
and it's
certainly
not middle America. Shahn's
window
presents
a
very specific
urban and
ethnic
community,
one that becomes
apparent
when the
photograph
is consid-
ered in the context of the other
photo-
graphs
taken on the same roll of film. On
this roll Shahn focused
closely
on
aspects
of New York
City
street life in 1936-
immigrants,
homeless
people,
and the
storefronts of
Jewish-owned
businesses.
Read in
sequence,
these
images
not
only
evoke the
intimate, insular world of a
Jewish neighborhood
on the Lower East
Side, but also inform us of
Jewish
rituals
and
religious responsibility.
For
example,
the
photographer's
window,
with its
wedding photographs,
is situated between
a
photograph
of a matzoh advertisement
(suggesting
the Passover
holiday), pictures
of
Jewish
men and a Hebrew bookstore
(connoting learning
and the
perpetuation
of
faith),
and kosher markets
(signifying
dietary laws).
Shahn took these
photographs
close to
the time when he had broken
sharply
from his
Jewish immigrant past, recently
separated
from his first wife and
family,
become involved in the bohemian circles
of Greenwich
Village,
and
just begun
to
travel around the
country
as a
graphic
artist and
photographer
for the Resettle-
ment Administration. On visits back to
New York from
Washington,
he
photo-
graphed
this
immigrant
world about
which he was so
ambivalent,
as if
attempt-
ing
to examine its
changes
since his
childhood and the
ways
it was
coping
during
the
Depression.28
But Shahn had more than
personal
or
sociological
reasons for
being
drawn to a
photographer's
window. For Shahn the
artist, the window
presented
an
opportu-
nity
to reflect
upon
the
practice
of
photography
itself,
for the
very
act of
photographing
a
photographer's
window
necessarily
established a
relationship
between the
photographer
and the
pictures
in the window-in this
case,
between studio
photography
and Shahn's
documentary
street
photography.
In fact,
the
image
tells us less about the
people
depicted
in the window than it does about
the conventions of
depiction
in
portrait
photography.
Studio
photography
as it was
practiced
at the time was
very
different from
Shahn's kind of
photography.
First of
all,
it took
place
indoors, with
large
view
cameras,
controlled
lighting, props,
and
backdrops.
It was a commercial
enterprise,
74 Winter 1993
16 Walker Evans,
Photographer's
Window
Display, Birmingham,
Alabama, 1936.
Photograph,
8 x
10 in.
Library
of
Congress,
Prints
and
Photographs
Division,
Washington,
D.C.
a business. Shahn's Leica enabled him to
work
informally
and to take more candid-
looking photographs, apparent
in the
cropped edges
and uneven illumination of
his window.
Contemporary
advertise-
ments
capitalized
on this distinction,
comparing
stiff and formal studio
photog-
raphy
with free and natural Leica
photog-
raphy
and, in the
process, creating
the
popular perception
of the Leica's
ability
to
capture
"true" life situations.
To have
photographed
a
photographer's
window involved a certain conceit on the
part
of
Shahn,
the candid
photographer
who
snapped
the
image
in an instant
when it had taken at least
twenty-four
sittings
for the studio
photographer
to fill
the window with
pictures.
There is a
long
tradition in the
history
of
painting
and
photography
of
using
a
picture
within a
picture
for aesthetic and social commen-
tary.
Walker
Evans,
for
example,
in his
well-known
photographer's
window,
documents a cross-section of the middle-
class
population
in
Birmingham,
Ala-
bama,
in 1936
(fig.
16).
But Evans's
window,
like
Shahn's, is also an
image
about
image making,
for it
appropriates
a
ready-made image, replaces
the act of
making
with the more
self-effacing,
anonymous
act of
taking,
and thus calls
into
question
the notion of
authorship.
It's an
image
about mass
production
and
the
way technology
can reduce individuals
to
small, uniform
squares-to just images.
But it's also about the
way
the camera can
bring
all these
strangers
into the same
nonhierarchical, democratic
space,
creating
a kind of
"family
of man." The
commercial
photos
in the window were
taken
by
an automatic machine and
obviously
bear little resemblance to the
kind of
photography
Evans
produced.
Both Evans and Shahn thus used the
photographer's
window as a means to
define their own roles in
photography.
Shahn made these statements even
more
explicitly
in his somber
painting
of
the
Photographer's
Window, which he
distinguished
from its source
photograph
in
significant ways.
He reduced the
number of
photographs
to fifteen and
enlarged
them. And
by omitting
the bar
mitzvah student-the most obvious
sign
of Jewishness-he made the
image
less
ethnic. He also rendered the children
plumper,
even a bit monstrous. Most
significantly,
he added to the window
some of his own
images,
based on his FSA
photographs:
an Ozark tenant
farmer,
a
Hungarian
miner and his
wife, and the
children of an Arkansas rehabilitation
client, all of whom he had encountered
on his
trips throughout
the South and
Midwest. The
juxtaposition
of these
suffering
rural
folk, who could not afford
to have their
pictures
taken,
with
smiling
middle-class
urbanites,
posed
for
special
occasions, is stark.29 Shahn
presented
his
Resettlement
subjects
in
sharper
focus
than their
neighbors
in the
window, with
greater
detail and more intense
expression
and attitude.
They appear
as flesh and
blood,
engaging
us
directly
and
evoking
our
sympathy
in the
way
that FSA
images
were intended to do.
Such a
glaring juxtaposition necessarily
raises class issues. Was Shahn
elevating
the social and economic status of the
75 American Art
17 Children
of
Rehabilitation Client,
Arkansas, 1935.
Photograph,
8 x
10 in.
Library
of
Congress,
Prints
and
Photographs
Division,
Washington,
D.C.
farmers,
giving
them
visibility
and
exposure typically
denied them,
or was he
calling
our attention to middle-class
ignorance
of
poverty
and
emphasizing
the
classes'
separate
worlds
by
the distinct
separation
of
images
in the window?
By
presenting
a more
representative
selection
of the American
population,
one that
includes the
oft-forgotten dispossessed,
Shahn
sought
to show us "how the other
half lives."
But Shahn's window does more than
document blatant class
inequalities:
it
comments on the nature of the documen-
tary project
itself. The
image
functions as
the artist's own advertisement for the FSA
project
(which
he
undoubtedly
favored
over studio
photography)
and
displays
the
types
of
photographs
that made for
effective
propaganda.
It is instructive to
compare
Shahn's use of FSA
photographs
in the window with the
way
the
govern-
ment and media used the same
images
to
inform the
public
about
poverty
and to
convince
Congress
of the need for relief
Just
as the
portraits of smiling
couples
were intended to sell a
particular image,
so too were the
FSA
photographs, according
to
some
contemporary
historians,
intended to sell a certain sanitized,
palatable
notion
ofpoverty.
programs.
Like
newspaper
or
government
editors, Shahn
cropped
the
photographs
he used for his window, abstracted them,
removed them from their
larger
contexts
(many
were
originally parts
of
series),
and
presented
them without their
original
captions. By doing
so,
he transformed
them into iconic
images
that show
poverty
with
dignity.
Shahn selected this
image
of the children of a rehabilitation
client
(fig.
17)
instead of the
boys'
entire
family,
for
example, presumably
because
76 Winter 1993
two children could
generate
more
sympa-
thy
and less
judgment
than a
picture
of a
poor family
with
many
children.
(In
his
painting,
the
picture
of the two
boys
was
altered to show
only
one
boy.)
Such
usage
affirms what historian
James
Curtis has
written about the FSA
photographers:
that in their
working process they
ar-
ranged subjects,
eliminated unwanted
elements, and selected
photographs
for
publication
that conformed to the
dominant cultural values of an urban
middle-class audience.30
On one level, then,
Shahn's
Photographer's
Window could be said to
illustrate a form of humanist documen-
tary
that has in recent
years
come under
attack
by
cultural and
photo
historians,
who
argue
that 1930s
documentary
did
not so much effect social
change
as
reinforce mainstream notions about
poverty.
The
government exploited
documentary photographs,
revisionist
scholars contend,
to
appease
the
public
that
something
was
being
done to amelio-
rate
poverty, suppress
the
potential
of a
working-class
revolution, and affirm
power
relations between the
patriarchal
state and its
poor
citizens. On another
level, however,
Shahn
may
have used his
FSA
images
in a more subversive manner,
for not
only
do
they
intrude on a world of
middle-class celebration,
but
they present
that world as
quite imperfect.
He ren-
dered his sitters
visually unappealing,
with
pasty
faces, distorted features,
toothy
smiles,
and stiff,
unnatural
poses.
Because
such an
uneasy juxtaposition
of these two
worlds was not a
typical propaganda
stratagem
found in FSA
publicity
at the
time,
Shahn's
employment
of it could be
seen as
supporting
what
photo
historian
Maren
Stange
has
argued-that
FSA
images
were more radical in their
implica-
tions than the ends to which the
govern-
ment and media used them in
legitimat-
ing
reform
ideology.31
In
Photographer's
Window, however,
Shahn went one
step
further
by using
his FSA
photographs
to
make his
paintings
even more blatant in
their social
commentary
than their
photographic
sources. In
raising
such
issues Shahn
ultimately questioned
the
effectiveness of the
documentary project
as a whole.
Shahn
subjected
his FSA
photographs
to the same conventions of
presentation
as
the more innocuous studio
photographs.
He
stylized
and abstracted the FSA
photographs
in their
painted
versions,
presenting
the child of a rehabilitation
client within the same dramatic shadow as
the
wedding pair
on the
top
row,
and
setting
the miner
couple
on a
platform
not unlike the
stage settings
before which
the children near them are
posed.
Shahn
thus
depoliticized
the
government images,
demonstrating
their limited
power
to
effect social
change. By displaying
them
in a window intended to attract
business,
he underscored the commercial nature of
the whole FSA
enterprise. Just
as the
portraits
of
smiling couples
were intended
to sell a
particular image,
so too were the
FSA
photographs, according
to some
historians, intended to sell a certain
sanitized,
palatable
notion of
poverty.
In its
contrivance, then, Shahn's
77 American Art
18 Detail of lens, Self-Portrait
with
Angle Viewfinder,
ca. 1939.
Drawing.
Private collection
19 Self-Portrait
among
Church Goers,
1939.
Tempera
on masonite, 20 x 29
12 in.
Formerly
in the Edward and
Betty
Marcus Foundation, Dallas,
Texas;
present
whereabouts unknown.
Reproduced
in Christie's
catalogue,
6
December 1985
20 Street Scene, Natchez,
Mississippi,
1935.
Photograph,
8 x 10 in.
Library
of
Congress,
Prints and
Photographs
Division,
Washington,
D.C.
painting acknowledges
the
problems
then encountered in
attempting
to
honestly
and
persuasively represent
marginalized peoples
for
purposes
of
social reform.32
The tension between
promoting
and
questioning documentary
is also revealed
in Shahn's
self-portrait
with
angle
viewfinder from 1939
(see
fig.
5).
Shahn
dedicated one version of the
drawing
to
Roy Stryker:
"To
Roy
who made it
possible
for us to work
uninterruptedly
for 5
years-a
full lifetime." This
gesture
suggests
the nature of Shahn's
working
relationship
with
Stryker
and,
on a
larger
level, the artist's ambivalent and
complex
relationship
to
government bureaucracy.
Shahn,
who shared
Stryker's
belief in
photography
as a tool for communication
and
dramatic,
effective
propaganda,
had
been valuable to his
employer
in
helping
him to
clarify
his
goals
and
promote
the
FSA
project.
Shahn was
grateful
for
Stryker's
devotion to his
photographers
and for his efforts to
protect
their
jobs
from
government
cutbacks and
charges
of
boondoggling.
But at the same time, the
artist had
problems
with
Stryker's igno-
rance about art and with the bureaucratic
authority
he
represented.33
In the
drawing
Shahn
cleverly
alludes
to such issues
by inscribing
a
pithy
commentary
on the lens of the camera
(fig.
18): "misery,
desolation, erosion,
cropping,
and dust"-the
subjects
FSA
photographers
were
supposed
to look for
on their
trips.
To
prepare
for these
trips,
the
photographers
were
given
reference
books recommended
by Stryker
as well as
outlines
(shooting scripts)
written
by
him.
Once in the field,
they
were
required
to
send all their film back to
Washington.
Even
though
the
photographers
received
photographs
and contact
prints
in the
field so
they
could
identify, caption,
and
make notations,
they
still
relinquished
much of their control over their
pictures
to the
printers,
writers, editors, and
layout
men who would
process,
file,
crop,
and
distribute their work to
newspapers,
magazines,
and exhibitions.
The inscribed lens reflects
Stryker's
general
desire to make his
photographers
into
sociologists
with cameras and
literalizes a
running joke
he and Shahn
shared
concerning
the latter's
request
for
"super-psychic
film" and a
"philosophical
lens" to obtain certain desired
pictures.
The word
cropping
is a
pun-a
reference
to both
sharecropping
and to the actual
cropping
of
photographs.
The inscribed
lens thus refers to what Maren
Stange
has
termed the
"management
of vision" and
to the fact that FSA
photographers
were
not the sole authors of their
pictures.34
Alternatively,
the lens could be read as
an
acknowledgment
of the
teamwork,
the
unity,
and the shared vision that Shahn
and others felt on the FSA
project.
Collaborative effort was in fact encour-
aged by Stryker,
who
promoted dialogue
and an
exchange
of ideas
among
his staff.
But in this
drawing
Shahn
ultimately
asserted his own
authorship
over his
vision
by rendering
the Leica an extension
of his
eye
and
linking
his hand so
closely
to the camera that the lines of his hand
actually merge
with those of the lens. The
artist, not the machine nor the words of
sociologists
or
Stryker,
is
clearly presented
as
being responsible
for the camera's
picture.35
The issue of artistic control is
explored
further in Shahn's
painting
Self-Portrait
among
Church Goers
(fig.
19),
in which
his
self-portrait
with
angle
viewfinder
appears again, only
this time in
painted
form. This
image,
constructed from a
group
of Shahn's FSA
photographs
of a
church in
Kentucky,
a street scene in
Natchez,
Mississippi (fig.
20),
and an
unidentified street scene,
was the artist's
pictorial response
to a
particular
instance
of
public
censure. The Reverend
Ignatius
W. Cox had attacked Shahn's sketch for
his Bronx Post Office mural
(1938-39),
which
incorporated
a
quote
from Walt
Whitman that Roman Catholics found
78 Winter 1993
-
^4 Ii
offensive. In
retaliation, the artist carica-
tured members of the Catholic
church,
using
his
photograph
of two old maids to
suggest
their stiff and
crotchety puritani-
cal natures and
setting
them
against
a
background
of
typically
small-town
church architecture. He further
empha-
sized their conservativeness
by contrasting
their drab black
garb
to his own
brighter,
stylish
attire. His ultimate
revenge,
however, was in his
ability
to take their
pictures
without their
knowing, snapping
them with his
angle
viewfinder to reveal
their "true" identities and
denying
them
the chance to
present
themselves as
they
would
presumably
wish to be seen. Shahn
used his Leica and
angle
viewfinder to
separate
the
photographer,
who holds the
power
of the
gaze,
from the
objects
of that
gaze, thereby demonstrating
both the
photographer's ability
to function as
acerbic social critic and the camera's
ability
to construct difference. For
Shahn,
then,
photography
had value other than
providing subjects
for his future
paintings:
it could be used to defend his
painting
against
conservative forces.
The
self-reflexivity displayed
in
Self-
Portrait
among
Church Goers
brings
us
back to
Photographer's
Window, which
shows more
literally
how
photography
served Shahn's art and how he transcribed
photographs
into
paintings.
In
Photographer's
Window Shahn demon-
strated not
only
how he abstracted and
generalized
his
photographs
when trans-
ferring
them onto canvas, but also how he
added elements that were at the time
more
traditionally
associated with
paint-
ing-texture
and
especially
color.
By
juxtaposing
color and black-and-white
photographs
in his window,
Shahn called
attention to the
phenomenon
of color
photography,
a
hotly
debated
subject
in
his
day.
The desire for color in
photographs
was as old as
photography
itself, and with
the advent of color film in the 1930s, the
period
between the wars came to be hailed
as the era of color. Color
film,
though
appealing
and
desirable, did not immedi-
ately replace
black-and-white film because
of its
expense;
its
difficult, labor-intensive
process;
and the fact that color
pictures
were often
highly
saturated and unnatural
in
appearance.
In
fact, because the
big
picture magazines
were
among
the few
that could afford the
process,
color
became associated with commercial
values, visual
deception, image promo-
tion, and
profit-making. According
to
photo
historian
Sally
Stein,
this is one
reason
why
color was used so
limitedly
and
cautiously
on the FSA
project
and
why
black-and-white
photography
maintained its
special
association with
truth and realism.36
It is thus
significant
that Shahn did not
render his own FSA
images
in the artifi-
cial-looking
color of the studio
portraits
below.
Equally noteworthy
is his use of
the studio
lights, ordinarily
intended to
illuminate
(a
metaphor
for
revealing
truth),
to block and thus distort the color
images.
In
short, Shahn inverted the
popular hierarchy
at the time that el-
evated
polychrome
over
monochrome,
especially
in
cinema,
reinforcing
tradi-
tional
"high"
art values that viewed black
and white (and the basic foundation
arts-drawing
and
design)
as
higher
and
more essential than
color,
an
added, extra
element in aesthetics.37
But Shahn called to mind more
specifically
another color
process
com-
monly
used in
photo
studios at the
time-hand
coloring,
a
process
that
existed
alongside
color
print photography
in the 1930s. Advertisements in
popular
photo journals
of the
day,
such as the
Commercial
Photographer,
reveal that
photo coloring
was a lowbrow
art-quick,
simple,
and
inexpensive.
Hand
coloring
would have
appealed
to Shahn because it
could be
self-taught
(with
the
help
of
home-study
courses and
special paints)
and lacked the
pretensions
of
"high"
art.
Shahn followed some of the rules of the
80 Winter 1993
trade, as laid out in
contemporary
manu-
als, such as
laying
down the flesh tone
first, then the cheek color. But
ultimately
he violated the standards of
good photo
coloring
with his
rough, painterly
surface.
Ideal hand-colored studio
photographs
were made with
transparent paints
so that
the color would not mask the
photograph
beneath.
They
emulated
prints
made from
color film, not
necessarily paintings.
That
Shahn's hand
coloring
is
opaque
and
textural calls attention to the fact that his
image
is not a
photograph
but a
painting
(or,
that his
image
is not
only
a
display
of
hand-painted photographs
but also a
painting
of
hand-painted photographs).
Photo
coloring
must have also
appealed
to
Shahn because, like
painting,
it involved
handwork,
yet
its
simplicity
allowed him
to
put
the time and labor back into the
image caught quickly
and
effortlessly by
the camera.
The
concept
of handwork held
great
relevance in New Deal
culture, which
promoted
a worker
imagery
in which
hands loomed
large,
as seen in Shahn's
own
posters
for the Office of War Infor-
mation
(OWI)
and the CIO.
Many
artists,
especially
those on the WPA/FAP
projects, aligned
themselves with manual
workers and were treated as such
by
government supervisors
who needed to
justify
the use of federal funds for art
during
an economic crisis.
Photographers
were also referred to as workers in
jour-
nals of the
period.38
In
Photographer's
Window Shahn
favored
painting
over
photography
for its
ability
to show color more
effectively
than
photographs, given
the infant state of
color
photography
at the time. The
painting
is also able to demonstrate the
artist's
many
talents, for Shahn is at once
a
photographer
of FSA
photographs,
colorist or hand colorer of
photographs,
and the
painter
of the entire
picture.
The assertion of
painting's representa-
tional
powers
as
being superior
to those of
photography
asks us to consider the
relationship
between
painters
and
photog-
raphers
in Shahn's
day.
Critic Elizabeth
McCausland, who had close contacts in
both
worlds, noted that some
painters
feared
technological unemployment
and
resisted
photography.
She claimed that
the conflict was
mostly
on the side of
painters
and
printmakers,
who saw their
pictures replaced by photographs
in the
big picture magazines,
because
photography
The
painting
is also able to
demonstrate the artist's
many
talents,
for
Shahn is at once a
photographer ofFSA photo-
graphs,
colorist or hand colorer
ofphotographs,
and the
painter
of
the entire
picture.
better served
advertising
and commercial
purposes.39
Shahn was
undoubtedly
sensitive to the threat
photography posed.
After 1939 Shahn
rarely
reflected with
such seriousness
upon
the nature of
photography
in his
painting.
On a few
occasions, however, he commented on the
current state of
photography
or
expressed
nostalgia
for an older form of
photogra-
phy.
This is seen in
My
Friend the
Photog-
rapher,
which
depicts
an itinerant
photog-
rapher
with an old-fashioned view camera
(fig.
21).
The
painting
was
inspired by
Shahn's
photograph
of a street
photogra-
pher
from Columbus, Ohio, in 1938
(fig.
22)-a
time when itinerant
photography
was a common
phenomenon.
In the
painting,
Shahn underscored the
honest,
hard-working qualities
of the
photogra-
pher by enlarging
his hand and
by
relocating
him from the commercialism of
a town environment
(apparent
in the
photograph)
to a
simpler,
less
congested
rural
setting.
He then
emphasized
his
perception
of the man's
piety by cleaning
81 American Art
21
My
Friend, the
Photographer,
1945.
Tempera
on board, 20 x 30 in.
Sid Deutsch
Gallery,
New York
22 Itinerant
Photographer,
Columbus,
Ohio, 1938.
Photograph,
8 x 10 in.
Library
of
Congress,
Prints and
Photographs
Division,
Washington,
D.C.
23 Candid
Photographer,
1955. Brush
drawing,
9 /2 x 7 /2 in. Present
whereabouts unknown.
Reproduced
in
Kennedy
Galleries Ben Shahn
exhibition
catalogue,
1968, no. 31
24
Self-portrait
of WeeGee from
Naked
City
(New
York: Essential
Books, 1945)
up
his white smock
(which
is soiled in the
photograph)
and
setting
him
against
an
Apostolic Gospel
church derived from
yet
another FSA
photograph by
Shahn.
The last
significant image
in which
Shahn addressed
photography
is a humor-
ous line
drawing
of 1955 that
depicts
an
evil-eyed
candid
photographer
with an
imposingly large speed-graphic
camera-a
comment on the state of
photojournalism
(fig.
23).
Throughout
the 1950s
photo-
journalism
dominated the
photography
world
through
mass-circulation
picture
magazines
like
Life
and Look. Since the
1930s the
photojournalist
had become a
ubiquitous presence
in the
popular
imagination,
and the
speed-graphic
was
the
archetypal press
camera for the first
half of the twentieth
century.
The
popular
perception
of the
photojournalist
in the
thirties and forties was an intrusive, crude,
rough, rowdy,
comic
figure,
as
exempli-
fied
by
WeeGee
(fig.
24).
By
the 1950s
the
image
had become a bit more
glamor-
ous:
freewheeling,
adventuresome,
and
invincible. Shahn's caricature,
showing
a
large, imposing photographer poised
with
his camera,
affirms some
aspects
of the
long-standing stereotype
of
photojournal-
ists. Shahn
emphasized
the
photojournalist's
intensity
with a
nervous,
tautly pulled
quality
of line. Such
stereotypical images
could still be found in
popular photo
journals
of the
day.
But because the
drawing
was executed at the time when
photojour-
nalists were
adopting
smaller format
cameras,
it is unclear whether Shahn's
caricature marks the
apex
of the older
speed-graphic
camera or the end of its
day.
As a
documentary photographer
Shahn
was
certainly
aware of the
emergence
of
commercial
photojournalism
and its
concurrent
development
with the FSA
project. Roy Stryker stayed
abreast of
activities of the
picture press
but made
clear distinctions between what he
considered "hurried and
superficial"
photojournalism
and its uninformed,
manipulative approach
with the FSA's
more
profound sociological investigation.
Stryker
and his
photographers
were
critical of the
"growing
use of
photogra-
phy
as a form of entertainment." Shahn
himself criticized certain forms of
journal-
istic
photography,
such as
Margaret
Bourke-White's and Erskine Caldwell's
You Have Seen Their Faces
(1937),
which
he called a "commercial
job,"
derivative
and
lacking
the dedication of FSA work.
FSA
photographers,
however, did learn
from the
photojournalists, especially
in
their use of
shooting scripts
and
picture
stories,
and
Stange
has even
argued
that
Stryker
was
actually promoting
a kind of
professional photojournalism, likening
his
work to
corporate public
relations. This
view,
along
with Shahn's
generally
positive
attitude about and extensive
involvement in commercial art,
precludes
any simple interpretation
of his
photo-
journalist.40
More
specifically,
Candid
Photographer
seems to be a
response
to the most
significant
moment of humanistic
photo-
journalism
of 1955-Edward Steichen's
"Family
of Man" exhibition at MoMA,
in
which Shahn's work was
prominently
featured. The exhibit
gathered photo-
graphs
from all over the world under the
populist, universalizing,
and
ultimately
depoliticizing
rubric of
"family,"
which
downplayed
the differences between the
cultures
represented
in the show. Even
though
Shahn
greatly respected
Steichen
and
strongly supported
the exhibition, he
nonetheless declared
painting's superiority
over
photography.
In a letter to the editor
of the New York Times, Shahn took
exception
to Aline Saarinen's review of
the exhibit,
in which she referred to
photography
as a folk
art, more
obligated
than
painting
to
represent
the external
world. After
defending photography
as a
keenly sophisticated
art,
Shahn affirmed
painting's higher
status as an art. At the
same time, however, he
rejected
the
introspective
tendencies of
contemporary
painting, exemplified
for him
by
Abstract
83 American Art
25 Man
Picking
Wheat, 1950. Black
ink on
paper,
37 3/4 x 25 in.
Fogg
Art
Museum, Harvard
University,
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Gift of
Meta and Paul
J.
Sachs Collection
26 Dorothea
Lange,
Member
of
the
Farming Group
at the
Jersey
Homesteads, ca. 1936.
Photograph,
8 x 10 in.
Library
of
Congress,
Prints
and
Photographs
Division,
Washing-
ton, D.C.
Expressionism,
and
championed recogniz-
able content and the kind of social
responsibility
Saarinen ascribed to
photography.41
In his
drawing
of the candid
photogra-
pher,
Shahn underscored that sense of
social
responsibility
to criticize-or at
least make fun of-both
photojournalism
and the camera as an
imposing piece
of
technology
that was worlds
apart
from his
preferred
Leica. Other
images
he made at
the time
similarly
comment on issues
central to his time,
as in his
pictures
of
scientists overwhelmed
by
their atomic
theories. Considered in this context,
Shahn's
photographer
resembles a robot
(or
a robotic mad
scientist).
The
image
also
suggests
the
oppressive
climate of the
McCarthy years
and the FBI's
interroga-
tion and surveillance of liberals,
to which
the artist was
frequently subjected.
This
changed political
climate most
likely
affected Shahn's use of
photography
by
the 1950s. Man in
Wheatfield (fig.
25),
for
example, disguises
its
photographic
source
(fig.
26)
beneath a minimal and
lyrical drawing style.
Such veiled
usage
may
have been a
way
for Shahn and other
politicized
artists of the Left to maintain
their connection to New Deal
ideology
while
avoiding possible censorship.
In
fact,
during
this
period
Shahn
promoted
an
image
of himself that
attempted
to
eschew
potentially dangerous
aesthetic
and
political categories,
one that con-
trasted
sharply
with his
portrayal
of
himself as an
active,
socially engaged
photographer
of seventeen
years
earlier.
Representation
of this new
image
is a self-
portrait
he made in 1956
(fig.
27),
at the
time of his exhibition at the
Fogg
Art
Museum and his Norton
professorship
at
84 Winter 1993
27 Ben Shahn,
poster
for Shahn
exhibition at the
Fogg
Art
Museum, 1956. Photo-offset in
black with hand
coloring,
11 x 9 in.
New
Jersey
State Museum Collection,
Trenton, Gift of the
Fogg
Art
Museum
Harvard. Shahn
portrayed
himself as an
aging, scholarly painter,
with
spectacles
and furrowed brow, dressed in formal
attire. This
drawing helped
to
promote
Shahn as a man of letters, and it stands as
the visual
counterpart
to the book that
grew
out of the Norton lectures, The
Shape of
Content
(1957),
his
philosophical
treatise on art
(which
makes
only
minimal
reference to
photography). Together,
book and
drawing present
Shahn as a
humanist-a safe
reputation
that
brought
him
popular appeal,
for it
conveyed
the
social concern of his New Deal
days
without the critical
edge
of his New Deal
photography.
85 American Art
Notes
I would like to thank
Jules Prown, Jonathan
Weinberg,
Frances Pohl,
Mary
Panzer, and
Alan Tansman for reading versions of this
article, and Bernarda Shahn,
Virginia
Mecklenburg, Beverly
Brannon, Yoshiko
Wada, and
especially Stephen
Taller for their
generous support
of
my
work.
1 James Thrall
Soby
to Ben Shahn, 16
December 1946, Ben Shahn
Papers,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, roll D147:1433.
2
Soby
to Shahn, 18
September
1947, Ben
Shahn
Papers,
roll D147:1450.
3 See
Merry
Foresta, "Art and Document:
Photography
of the WPA's Federal Art
Project,"
in
Official Images:
New Deal
Photography (Washington,
D.C.: Smith-
sonian Institution Press, 1987), p.
154.
4 See Diane
Tepfer,
"Edith
Gregor Halpert
and the Downtown
Gallery
Downtown:
1926-1940: A
Study
in American Art
Patronage"
(Ph.D. diss.,
University
of
Michigan, 1989), pp.
98-101.
5 See
correspondence
between
Halpert
and
Shahn and
Halpert
and Van Deren Coke
regarding
Coke's inclusion of Shahn in his
pioneering
exhibition and
catalogue
The
Painter and the
Photograph
(1964).
Halpert
was
actually supportive
of Coke's
project,
but she was
initially "puzzled" by
his theme,
prompting
her
request
for a
"fuller
explanation"
and her
encourage-
ment of Shahn to select the
pairs
of
paintings
and
photographs
to
appear
in
the book. Letters 10
May
1963; 14
September
1963; 11 October 1963; and
30 December 1963, Ben Shahn
Papers,
ca.
1924-89.
6 Bernarda Shahn to Davis Pratt, 17
August
1969,
Photograph
Files,
Fogg
Art
Museum. This letter
responded
to a letter
from
Agnes Mongan (acting
director of
the
Fogg) proposing
an exhibition of
Shahn's
photographs
at the
Fogg.
Mrs.
Shahn was
very supportive
of the show's
effort to note Shahn's achievements as a
photographer
but did not want him
promoted simply
as a
painter
who used
photography.
She stated that he did not
take
photographs
with the intention of
using
them in another medium. In her
writings
she has
always acknowledged
the
great importance
of
photography
to
Shahn's art and vision, but with the
qualification
that he did not use
photogra-
phy
as a
sketchpad
and that he
eventually
put
down his Leica because it
began
to
trap
him in a certain
point
of view.
Along
with
Soby
and
Halpert,
I believe Bernarda
Shahn did not
personally object
to Shahn's
use of
photography
in
painting
but felt
that
public juxtaposition
of his
paintings
and
photographs
could allow for literal,
mechanical, and hence
simplistic
connections to be made
by
those not
attuned to the nuances of his
working
process.
Bernarda Shahn, interviews with
author, 1989-93.
7 See, for
example,
Selden Rodman, Portrait
ofan
Artist As an American: Ben Shahn, A
Biography
with Pictures
(New
York:
Harper
and Row, 1951), p.
96.
8
Nancy
Newhall, "Ben Shahn," in Photo
Notes
(November 1947): 3; and Clement
Greenberg,
"Art," The Nation 165 (1
November
1947):
481.
9 Reviewers' comments include Robert
Coates,
"Contemporary
Americans," New
Yorker 23 (11
October
1947): 62; and
"The Art of Ben Shahn," unidentified
review, November 1947, Ben Shahn
Scrap-book,
vol. 1, Museum of Modern
Art.
10 Clement
Greenberg, quoted
in Frances
Pohl, Ben Shahn: New DealArtist in a
Cold War Climate, 1947-1954 (Austin:
University
of Texas Press, 1989), p.
57;
Greenberg, p.
481.
11
Soby
to Shahn, 16 December 1946, Ben
Shahn
Papers,
roll D146:1433; James
Thrall
Soby,
Ben Shahn
(New
York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1947), pp.
13-
14.
12 John Szarkowski, Looking
at
Photographs:
100 Pictures
fom
the Collection
of
the
Museum
ofModern
Art
(New
York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p.
118.
See
Christopher Phillips,
"The
Judgment
Seat of
Photography,"
in Richard Bolton,
ed., The Contest
ofMeaning:
Critical
Histories
of Photography,
ed. Richard
Bolton
(Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1989),
pp.
15-48.
13 The situation was
complex,
however, for
as Pohl notes, Shahn and MoMA were
attacked in the late 1940s for both
"aesthetic conservativeness" and
"political
radicalism." Pohl, p. 76. Neither
Soby
nor
the staff at MoMA were
conspiring against
Shahn's
politics
or his
photography. Soby,
in fact, did not want to
soft-pedal
Shahn's
political
views or activities in his
essay
for
the MoMA
catalogue.
He included Shahn's
political posters
in the show and,
along
with Barr and others, defended the artist
against reactionary
backlash. Several
years
later he even wanted to write about Shahn's
use of
photography.
See
Soby's
letters
from the 1947 MoMA exhibit, James
Thrall
Soby Papers,
Museum of Modern
Art Archives,
filing
unit 12; and letters
from
Soby
to Shahn, Ben Shahn
Papers,
roll D147:1433, 1439-40, 1458-59.
Shahn's
photographs
were in MoMA's
collection as
early
as 1938 and
periodically
exhibited. He was included in
photogra-
phy symposia
and maintained
good
relations with Edward Steichen, the
director of the
photography department
from 1947 to 1962.
14 See
John Morse, "Ben Shahn: An
Interview,"
Magazine ofArt
37
(April
1944): 136-41. Shahn
spoke
of the
inadequacy
of
drawing
from life in a
interview with Richard Doud for the
Archives of American Art
(1964), p.
1.
15 For Shahn's most extensive statements on
photography,
see Morse,
p.
139; "Photos
for Art," U.S. Camera 9
(May 1946): 30-
32, 57; Ben Shahn, "Henri Cartier-
Bresson,"
Magazine ofArt
40
(May
1947:
189-93; Ben Shahn, "What Is Modern
Painting,"
American
Photography
(March
1951): 147; Doud interview
(1964);
and
Arthur Goldsmith, "An Unfinished
Interview," Technical
Photography
1
(uly
1969): 29, 33.
16 His
photographs
had in fact been
exhibited in
group
shows since the 1930s.
Questionnaire
in Ben Shahn
Papers,
ca.
1924-89.
17 Frederick Lewis Allen, Since
Yesterday
1929-1939 (New
York: Bantam Books,
1939), pp.
211-12. See "The U.S.
Minicam Boom," Fortune 14
(October
1936): 124-29, 160-70.
18 A
major turning point
in minicam
history
was 1935-36. Willard
Morgan
and
Henry
Lester
published
The Leica Manual
(1935),
kodachrome film became
commercially
available in the
thirty-five-
millimeter format, and
Life magazine
hit
the newsstands in 1936. Editors and
engravers
on the FSA
project
at first
resisted miniature
photography mostly
because of aesthetic reasons but also
because of the
practical problems
of
working
with small
negatives.
See
Sally
Stein, "FSA Color: The
Forgotten
Document," Modern
Photography
43
(anuary 1979): 163.
Shahn was not alone in his critical
attitude toward the minicam boom's
technical obsession. Some art
photogra-
phers
like Ansel Adams felt that the
number of
gadgets
rendered minicam
work a
nightmare
for serious students. A
photographer's
dismissal of
technique
and
fancy equipment
could also be a
way
to
maintain
mystique
or
power
over the
artistic
process.
In the
early
1930s
photographers
like Edward Steichen,
Edward Weston, and Cecil Beaton
boasted about their
inexpensive
lens and
cameras.
Similarly, Ralph
Steiner refused
to
provide
technical information for an
exhibition of his work,
explaining
that it
was as
silly
as
asking
a
painter
what kind of
canvas he used.
86 Winter 1993
19 Colin Westerbeck, "Ben Shahn: Artist as
Photographer,"
Connoisseur212 (October
1982):
100-101. Shahn also
enjoyed
a
certain freedom from not
being officially
under
Stryker's employ
for much of his
time with the RA/FSA.
20 See Doud, p. 10; and Edwin Rosskam,
"Los anos de la depresion," in Ben Shahn:
Dibujos y Fotografas
de los anos
treintay
cuarenta (Madrid:
Salas Pablo Ruiz
Picasso, 1984), p.
23. Rosskam felt that
Shahn exaggerated
his
illiteracy
in
photography.
21 Shahn
ironically
referred to himself at the
time as a tourist
photographer;
see
Bernarda Shahn, "Ben Shahn,
Fotografias
y
Pinturas," in Ben Shahn:
Dibujosy
Fotograflas, p.
11. Writer
Noriya
Abe
noted, however, the
special
un-touristlike
quality
of Shahn's
photographs
of
Kyoto
that
exposed
a face of
Japan
unknown to
most
Japanese. "Shimingaka
no mita
Nippon," Geijutsu
Shincho 11
(May
1960): 56-67.
22
Many
of these files can be found in the
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution,
Washington,
D.C. Shahn's
models for his
photo
files were most
likely
the New York Public
Library
Picture
Collection, which he had used
extensively
in the 1930s, and the FSA file, with which
he had close contact as a
photographer,
an
exhibition
organizer,
and a
graphic
designer.
Alan
Trachtenberg
has
analyzed
the
organization
of the FSA file on the
premise
that the
way photographs
were
classified and used can inform us about the
values of the culture in which
they
were
made. Shahn's files are
by
no means as
systematic
or
theoretically
conceived as
these
examples,
but neither are
they
completely arbitrary.
See
Trachtenberg,
"From
Image
to
Story: Reading
the File,"
in
Beverly
Brannon and Carl Fleischhauer,
eds.,
DocumentingAmerica:
1935-1943
(Berkeley: University
of California Press,
1988), pp.
43-73.
23 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, "Ben Shahn and
the Problem of
Jewish Identity,"
Jewish Art
12-13 (1986/87): 318, 306.
24 See Cecile
Whiting, Antifascism
in
American Art
(New
Haven: Yale Univer-
sity
Press, 1989), p. 165.
25 Doud, p. 13; Goldsmith, p. 29; and Van
Deren Coke,
telephone
interview with
author,
July
1990.
26 See, for
example, John Morse, ed., Ben
Shahn
(London:
Seeker and
Warburg,
1972), pp.
41-58, 64-87; and "This Is
Ben Shahn,"
transcript
of a CBS television
interview
(1965),
Ben Shahn
Papers,
ca.
1924-89.
Drawing
was in fact central to
Shahn's art;
his earliest
training
was in
drawing
and
lithography,
and a
graphic
sensibility pervades
much of his work.
27 Ann
Sargent
Wooster, "New York
Reviews," Art News 76
(February 1977):
124.
28 The number of Eastern
European Jews
settling
in Manhattan's Lower East Side
decreased
significantly
from 1931 to 1936,
but
by
1936 there was some increase
again
partly
due to the rise of Hitler in
Germany.
Shahn therefore documented
the streets of this area at a
turning point
in
immigration history.
29 If Shahn's studio resided on the Lower
East Side, the clients in the window were
most
likely
from the
working
or lower-
middle classes. In
juxtaposition
with the
rural
poor,
however,
they
are transformed
into a more
privileged group
of
people,
hence
my
use of the term middle class.
30 See
James Curtis, Mind's
Eye,
Mind's
Truth: FSA
Photography
Reconsidered
(Philadelphia: Temple University
Press,
1989).
31 On criticism of the
documentary
tradition, see
John Tagg,
The Burden
of
Representation (Cambridge:
MIT Press,
1988),
as well as the
writings
of Martha
Rosier, Alan Sekula,
Abigail
Solomon-
Godeau,
Sally
Stein, and Maren
Stange.
On the radical
implications
of FSA
ideology,
see
Stange, Symbols
of deal
Life:
Social
Documentary Photography
in
America 1890-1950 (New
York:
Cambridge University
Press, 1989),
p. xv.
32 I am not
claiming
that Shahn intended the
meanings
I have
suggested
for
Photographer's
Window, but rather that he
and other FSA
photographers
were aware
of the
ideological implications
of their
pictures
and their
potential
for
being
used
by
different individuals and institutions
for different
political
ends.
33 Shahn was one of the
important players
in
the
early years
of the RA/FSA
project
and
continued to be consulted
by Stryker
even
after his
resignation
in 1938.
Although
they
maintained warm and
friendly
relations over the
years,
in
retrospect
Shahn
expressed seemingly contradictory
views about both
Stryker
and the
government.
See Doud,
pp.
4, 10, 12-13,
16-17,26-27.
34 For an excellent, well-balanced account of
Stryker's
combination of direction and
concession of control to
photographers
on
the FSA and Standard Oil
projects,
see
Ulrich Keller,
Highway
as Habitat: A
Roy
Stryker Documentation, 1943-1955 (Santa
Barbara:
University
Art Museum, 1986),
pp.
33-38. For a more critical assessment
of
Stryker's position,
see
Stange, pp.
89-
131.
35 In his interview with Doud, Shahn said,
"I
felt I had more control over
my
own
medium than I did over
photography.
Extraneous material entered into it that I
couldn't control in
photography except
in
very
few instances where I felt there was a
total
picture" (p. 24). Apparently
Shahn
wanted nothing to come between him and
his
subject,
so he chose to see his camera as
an extension of his
eye.
36 See Stein,
pp.
90-99, 162-64, 166; and
Sally
Stein, "The Rhetoric of the Colorful
and the Colorless: American
Photography
and Material Culture between the Wars"
(Ph.D. diss., Yale
University,
1991).
37
Sally
Stein, discussion with the author,
January
1993.
38 Shahn
spoke
about the biases he held
when he first came to do
government
work for RA/FSA in 1935. He claimed he
had little use for bureaucrats and those
who didn't
produce (meaning
with their
hands),
attributing
much of this attitude
to his
family background
of
woodcarving
and
pottery.
Doud,
p.
12.
39 See Elizabeth McCausland, "American
Photography
in
Representative
Show,"
The
Springfield
Sunday
Union and
Republican,
24 October 1937, p. 6E,
Roy
Stryker Papers,
Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, roll NDA9:426.
Despite
this resistance, there was
nonetheless interaction between the two
communities,
especially
in the fine art
world in New York, as seen in the
pioneering
efforts of Barbara
Morgan
and
others in
organizing
a
photography
exhibition for the American Artists
Congress
in 1937. Several
painters
led
by
Paul Strand
fought
to secure a
special
section for creative
photography
in the
Congress.
40
Stryker, quoted
in
Keller,
p.
33; Stein,
"FSA Color,"
p.
64; Shahn
quoted
in
Doud,
p.
20. See
Stange, p.
108. Shahn
consistently objected
to the distinctions
made between "fine" and commercial art.
41 Shahn wrote, "I feel that the status of
painting
as an art is a
higher
one than that
of
photography
not because the one is
responsible,
the other
irresponsible,
but
simply
because
painting
is able to call
much more out of the artist himself and is
able to contain a fuller
expression
of the
artist's own
capacities
than in
photogra-
phy."
Ben Shahn, "In the Mail: Art Versus
Camera," New York Times, 13
February
1955,
p.
15.
87 American Art

Ben Shahn Article

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ben Shahn Article

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Smithsonian Institution

You might also like