Word: shahn
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...issue was going to press. But he took his first pictures of consequence in the preceding year. At the age of 28, he joined the fabled team of photographers for the historical section of the U.S. Farm Security Administration, a group that included Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn. Examining an impoverished rural America, they made some of photography's most trenchant and memorable images. In the FSA, Mydans learned the moral dimension of photography. No eye cast upon the hardships of those years could afterward decline into a tool for pretty picturemaking. A natural storyteller, he also learned...
...Even as Shahn portrays the despair and melancholy of the Depression, he also captures the hope and strength of the people, especially through his photographs of children. In "Greenwich Village (New York City)," circa 1932-35, Shahn portrays at the same time the time's despair and youth's hope. Here he captures four boys gathered on the sidewalk, looking at each other like lost children. The boy in the center concentrates on the crumpled newspaper he holds in his hands. There is a sadness that comes with the attention that he devotes to this seemingly old and worthless newspaper...
...youth, freshness in the ability to dream. The boy in the center does not seem to notice the despair around him; he is focused and content with his newspaper. He does not let the fact that it is crumpled and torn detract from the content which it holds. Shahn captures the life and hope of children as they embrace the world with a boldness free of despair. Shahn documents this capturing of life, at its fullest even when circumstances are at their worst. And this documentation of history takes us beyond facts to the heart of humanity during the Depression...
...photography, Shahn captures something about everyday life that makes it more than a picture, but a document of personal and historical despair and triumph. Shahn gives us a taste of what life in New York was like during the Depression for ordinary people. He has an amazing way of capturing the hurt and the despair--as well as the hope and the innocence--in the hearts of the people. Walking through the show, you feel almost as if you were walking with the people in the photographs, feeling their emotions, seeing their hurt first-hand--and somehow knowing that...
...Taking a picture is the ability to transfer the physical reality onto film. Making a picture is imbuing that photograph with meaning and purpose. Making a picture is creating the individual in the photograph, so that the viewer is led to question, understand and empathize. Shahn's making of New York City during the Great Depression is a historical documentation of not only the physical realities, but also the realities of the soul of humanity. His works highlight the ordinary in a time of extraordinary loss, despair and, dare we say, hope...