Word: shahn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...read campaign literature, you'd know David A. Wylie is not an average city council candidate. His pamphlet, "Re-Inventing Democracy," includes Ben Shahn line-drawings and quotations from Walt Whitman...
...Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn collects pictures taken in the 1930's. Shahn began by photographing people in the streets of New York's Lower East Side. Later, when the Federal government gave him a job, he took pictures of sharecroppers and farmers and small-town people in Appalachia, the Ozarks, and Ohio. When he didn't photograph people, he photographed the artifacts which were closest to them--the circus posters which advertised their entertainments or their hand-painted signs with messages like "This is the car HOOVER promised ME, ROOSEVELT gave ME, FOR GODS SAKE DON'T LET LANDON...
...Shahn's working approach was primitive, his visual sense was not. By trade he was a painter and graphic artist of considerable reputation; in person he was a close friend and one-time roommate of the late Walker Evans...
...Mulhall and Child, Ozark Family, Arkansas, 1935" may seem casually taken, yet it is a perfect picture. The mother, child and doll are incongruous in size, expression, and surface texture. They are also rather desperately poor. Another photograph of these subjects could have been chaotic or shocking or both; Shahn's is tied together formally by intricate series of triangular rhythms and rescued from pathos by the contentment of the child and the alert concern of its mother...
Such an ability to record rhythmic and warmly insightful juxtapositions is the genius of Shahn's photographs. They differ considerably from most of the best photography done in America during his era; these are gay documents of a world that the more gravely-inclined have seen as lonely and tragic. The difference may betray a lack of seriousness that prevents Shahn's work from being ranked with truly great photographers like Evans. But serious analysis is only one photographic possibility; Shahn was simply interested in seeing things wonderfully...