Ben Shahn
I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.
I felt very strongly the whole social impact of that depression, you know, and I felt very strongly about the efforts that this Resettlement Administration was trying to accomplish; resettling people, helping them, and so on.
An amateur is someone who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
It used to be twelve people crowded around a sewing table; now it's ten.
When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.
When a man returned from the field and we'd look at the work, we'd criticize each other very genuinely and never offensively. And we would avoid all tricks, angle shots were just horrible to us.
Whatever I get involved in, I'm totally involved, you see.
The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn't have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn't get as far as Hoboken at that time.
Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I'd done even years ago doing people. I couldn't get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.
So, I was offered this job to come down there but first it was suggested that I take a trip around the country in the areas in which we worked to see what it's all about, and I tell you that was a revelation to me.
Roy was just another bureaucrat to me, but I realized very soon that without Roy this thing would have died.
Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.
Now, when I came on to Washington to begin my job, I was so interested in photography at that time that I really would have preferred to work with Stryker than with my department, which was more artistic if you wish.
Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
It's pretty hard to measure influence of written or visual material.
It's a little bit like my inability to read a guide book before I go anywhere. I can read it after I've been there and by the same logic I refuse to accept any technical stunts from anybody. I refused to learn more than I knew and I confess I missed a great deal.
In the South or in the mine country, wherever you point the camera there is a picture.
In '38, this time I did a job for Mr. Stryker. I went on his payroll at about half the salary I was getting before, to cover what he called Harvest in Ohio.
I've been asked a great deal about the influence I've had with my work and it's impossible to say, you know.
I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.
I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.
I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.
I still love to look at photographs but I couldn't do it myself anymore.
I remember traveling around in Arkansas with Senator Robinson, and I told him what this little trick was. He felt very much part of it and had me take pictures of people unbeknownst to them.
I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
I didn't care where my works were published.
I did take my camera along, as I felt there wouldn't be enough time to draw the things I wanted to do. I did some drawing and did a lot of photography but I was not part of Stryker's outfit at all.
I confess that Roy was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time.
I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.Collection: Believe
An ametuer is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.Collection: Jobs
It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.Collection: Art
Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.Collection: Artist
I love chaos.... It's the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.Collection: Elements
Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.Collection: Believe
The artist must operate on the assumption that the public consists in the highest order of individual; that he is civilized, cultured, and highly sensitive both to emotional and intellectual contexts. And while the whole public most certainly does not consist in that sort of individual, still the tendency of art is to create such a public - to lift the level of perceptivity, to increase and enrich the average individual's store of values... I believe that it is in a certain devotion to concepts of truth that we discover values.Collection: Art
If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.Collection: Art
The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man's loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.Collection: Art
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.Collection: Essence
Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.Collection: War
Form is the shape of content.Collection: Shapes
It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.Collection: Teaching
The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.Collection: Artist
Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.Collection: Art
The apprehension of... values is intuitive; but it is not a built-in intuition, not something with which one is born. Intuition in art is actually the result of... prolonged tuition.Collection: Art
It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.Collection: Art
The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained - trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.Collection: Eye
The moving toward one's inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.Collection: Moving
What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?Collection: Fall
The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.Collection: Artist
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.Collection: Art