Ben Shahn: Artistic Style & Methods

Ben Shahn came to documentary photography as a painter, and his FSA pictures bear the mark of an artist trained to compose. Unlike Walker Evans, who favored a large, deliberate view camera, Shahn embraced the speed and portability of the 35mm Leica. The small handheld camera let him move quickly through markets, fairs, and streets, catching gestures and expressions in passing rather than arranging them.

His signature tool was a right-angle viewfinder—a prism that allowed him to point the lens away from the person he was actually photographing. Holding the camera at his chest or side and appearing to aim elsewhere, Shahn could record people candidly and unposed, absorbed in their own activity. The result is a photography of overheard moments: a sidelong glance, a slumped shoulder, a child watching a sideshow, all caught without the self-consciousness that a raised camera provokes.

Shahn originally took up the camera partly to gather reference material for his paintings, photographing faces, postures, signs, and architectural details he could later use at the easel. This origin shaped his eye. He was drawn to the same things he painted: hand-lettered signs, shop windows, weathered faces, and the geometry of porches, fences, and storefronts. Many of his photographs have the cropped, asymmetrical framing and flattened space of his graphic work.

He was attentive above all to people and the textures of everyday life under economic hardship. Where some FSA images were composed to argue a political point, Shahn's tend toward sympathetic observation—the dignity and humor of ordinary people going about ordinary business in extraordinary times. His subjects pick cotton, lean on counters, ride carousels, and gather at medicine shows, rarely aware they are being seen.

Shahn felt that the camera and the brush served the same end. Photography, painting, and print were for him different means to one purpose: to show the world as it looked through his eyes. That conviction gives his documentary work its consistency of vision and links the FSA negatives at the Library of Congress to the social-realist art for which he is equally known.