Quotes from Ben Shahn

It's pretty hard to measure influence of written or visual material.

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.

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

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.

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

The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man's loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.

Now, when I came on to Washington to begin my job, I was so interested in photography at that time that I really would have preferred to work with Stryker than with my department, which was more artistic if you wish.

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.

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

In the South or in the mine country, wherever you point the camera there is a picture.

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.

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.

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.

Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.

I didn't care where my works were published.

I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.

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.

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

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.

It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

If what any artist has to say is fundamentally human and profound the public will ultimately take his work unto itself. But if his own conceptions are limited and narrow in their human meaning it seems likely that time will erase his work.