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The popular eye is not untrained it is only wrongly trained - trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.

Ben Shahn

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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
Popular
Insincere
Vision
Wrongly
Inferior
Eye
Inferiors
Representation
Visuals
Visual
Untrained
Trained
Representations

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
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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.
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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.
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I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?
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I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
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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.
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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.
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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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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
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Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material... so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.
Ben Shahn
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All art is based on non-conformity.
Ben Shahn
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A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship it may be a searching study of psychological states it may be a nostalgic glance backward it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.
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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.
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I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
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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.
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