Shahn & Shahn

[Afterimage, February 1976, review of Ben Shahn, Photographer: An Album from the Thirties, edited, with an introduction by Margaret R. Weiss, Da Capo Press/82 plates/$9.95 (hb), and The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn, edited by David Pratt, Harvard University Press/147 pp./$15.00 (hb)]

There are now two collections of Ben Shahn photographs: you have a choice.

Ben Shahn, Photographer (1973), a slate-colored book with endpapers of surpassing ugliness, has 82 pictures adequately reproduced on shiny pages. The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn (December 1975) has an off-white linen cover and 110 pictures adequately reproduced on tannish matte paper. All the photos in Ben Shahn, Photographer are from Shahn's work for the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1938. Eighty-four of the pictures in The Photographic Eye are from his FSA work; the rest he made during the early thirties in New York City and a New York state reformatory. Twenty-six pictures appear in both books, but each book has excellent pictures that aren't in the other, The Photographic Eye having more of them.

The Photographic Eye has a better preface (by David Pratt) and an affecting, brief recollection of Shahn by Archibald MacLeish. It also has a much better binding: signatures stitched and glued in the old durable way. The middle pages of my two-year-old copy of Ben Shahn, Photographer, which is bound like a paperback, unsignatured, unstitched, are already falling away from their glue.

There are good reasons why several publishers would come out with books of Shahn's photographs. He was an important painter and graphic artist, and had a following even among people usually indifferent to art (he did covers for TIME magazine, after all). His photos have been unknown, are readily available for reproduction (free of copyright), and frequently echo the work of the photographers of proven marketability who greatly influenced him, Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

And there is another reason, a reason so obvious no one mentions it. Much of Shahn's photography of the 1930s resembles photography now being done. Not in content--in technique. Shahn is worth looking at because he is the granddaddy of the grab-shooters of the Age of Aquarius: the first American master of 35mm.

To see this best you need Ben Shahn, Photographer. Too many of Shahn's pictures in The Photographic Eye are too successful, too discreet, and the book's slightly sepia tone makes his work look as dated as rotogravure. Ben Shahn, Photographer has more crummy pictures--off-focus, ill-framed (half-heads gone, arms gone), disorientedly foreshortened, blurred and grimy with underlighting. Reproduced here in dingy black and white on slippery paper, these pictures look as though they might have been done last week by a ferocious disciple of Robert Frank. It is hard to believe that anyone in the 1930s other than Shahn saw these as photographs and not mere refuse from the "candid camera," as 35mm was then called.

It may be that Shahn himself didn't consider them photographs. They may have been just intriguing graphic possibilities. Unlike Evans and Cartier-Bresson (and, later, Frank) he didn't have a photographic vision to put across; The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn is a misleading title: he had more than one eye. He would sometimes take pictures like Evans', his Leica mimicking a large-format camera (note how Shahn characteristically sneaks a couple of strollers into an Evans picture: page 22 in The Photographic Eye), and he would sometimes be as compositional and poetic as Cartier-Bresson (see the Circleville, Ohio, railway station in both books).

But often his work was unlike either man's. Shahn's fundamental interest in photography was experimental: he wanted to see what it would let him see. Photography was a subsidiary concern to him--subsidiary to painting and even more subsidiary to life. And because it was, he had sufficient contempt for the medium to allow him to do, we now see, astonishingly new things with it.