Quote

I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.

Ben Shahn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ben Shahn
Age: 70 †
Born: 1898
Born: September 12
Died: 1969
Died: March 14
Artist
Designer
Graphic Artist
Lithographer
Painter
Photographer
Kovno
Benjamin Shahn
Benjamin Shan
Studio
Photography
Became
Interested
Evans
Found
Sketching
Walker
Inadequate
Sharing

More quotes by Ben Shahn

Image
All art is based on non-conformity.
Ben Shahn
Image
I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
Ben Shahn
Image
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.
Ben Shahn
Image
I confess that Roy [Stryker] 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.
Ben Shahn
Image
All art is based on nonconformity ... Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.
Ben Shahn
Image
It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.
Ben Shahn
Image
The popular eye is not untrained it is only wrongly trained - trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
Ben Shahn
Image
We tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner. But that's the paradox because the only thing extraordinary about it was that it was so ordinary. Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it's called documentary, which I suppose is all right ... We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.
Ben Shahn
Image
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.
Ben Shahn
Image
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.
Ben Shahn
Image
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.
Ben Shahn
Image
Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
Ben Shahn
Image
Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
Ben Shahn
Image
It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.
Ben Shahn
Image
I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
Ben Shahn
Image
The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man's loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
Ben Shahn
Image
If one has set for himself the position that his painting shall not misconstrue his personal mode of thinking, then he must be rather alert to just what he does think.
Ben Shahn
Image
How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
Ben Shahn
Image
It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.
Ben Shahn
Image
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.
Ben Shahn