Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahnwas a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content...
NationalityLithuanian
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth12 September 1898
CountryLithuania
believe paint feels
Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
art believe emotional
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.
believe artist labels
I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
angle helpful pictures quality
So, most of my pictures don't have any posed quality and this was a very helpful thing in the whole quality of my work, this angle finder.
felt people senator traveling trick
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.
bit confess editing hole incredibly number punch quite roy ruined stopped
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.
accept bit confess great guide inability knew logic missed refuse refused stunts technical
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.
Whatever I get involved in, I'm totally involved, you see.
realized roy
Roy was just another bureaucrat to me, but I realized very soon that without Roy this thing would have died.
crowded people twelve
It used to be twelve people crowded around a sewing table; now it's ten.
love
I still love to look at photographs but I couldn't do it myself anymore.
I didn't care where my works were published.
mine south wherever
In the South or in the mine country, wherever you point the camera there is a picture.
angle avoid field genuinely horrible man returned
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.