Top 20 Ben Shahn Quotes

Whatever I get involved in, I’m totally involved, you see.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.

I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

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.

It used to be twelve people crowded around a sewing table; now it’s ten.

Roy was just another bureaucrat to me, but I realized very soon that without Roy this thing would have died.

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.

I still love to look at photographs but I couldn’t do it myself anymore.