Ben Shahn

Abstract

Abstract In the fall of1935, Ben Shahn (1898-1969), the well-known painter and graphic artist, set out in a Model A Ford with a Leica camera to photograph the rural South. Although Shahn had often referred to photographs, especially newspaper photographs, as source material for his paintings, he had only modest training and limited experience as a photographer when he began working for the federal government. Shahn was employed first by the Special Skills Unit and later by the Historical Unit of the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA). He was one of a dozen or so New Deal photographers, including Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Walcott, who were responsible for the accumulation of more than 80000 documentary photographs used by the Roosevelt administration to promote New Deal relief and recovery programmes.