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.

Being Seen

I'm an Adam Gopnik fan, and though his January 28th New Yorker bright on Nicholas Sarkozy's love life didn't show him at his free-wheeling, insightful best, it did mention a cover of France's le nouvel observateur I wanted to see. And here it is.


You may not recognize the obscured face or bare fanny, but as the red letters say, it's Simone de Beauvoir. She was photographed in 1950 in Chicago, where she was having a tryst with the slum-living and -writing novelist Nelson Algren. She later wrote ecstatically of the romance and dedicated a book to him. Algren made light of the affair. "So I slept with her," he told his friends. "I showed her around Chicago," he told Paris Review interviewers in 1955. "I showed her the electric chair and everything." In his Walk on the Wild Side (1956), he famously wrote, "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

Though I've read almost nothing by de Beauvoir, I bet she would love appearing in this photo on the cover of a leading French magazine and celebrating her hundred birthday, January 9, 2008, in her birthday suit. First, because the photo shows a de Beauvoir that those of us who remember her don't, can't, remember. This is Simone at 42, still a delectable nymph. Gopkin says, "It's quite a photograph. (It's quite a rear)," as though the rear were big; but no! he's not seeing the rear that's here but rather the rear he imagines from pictures he's seen of de Beauvoir grown old and matronly. The rear that's here could grace a Balanchine dancer. And like a Balanchine dancer's, de Beauvoir's torso is poignantly thin. One wants her to turn from the mirror and run to us for comfort and affection.

Second, de Beauvoir is here presenting herself as she wanted--or was willing--to be seen. (The picture wasn't taken by Algren but by a photographer friend, Art Shay, and was obviously set up.) The Second Sex (1949) had made her famous, and its argument that men belittle women when they see them as sex objects didn't take an Einstein to understand, an Algren would do. Still, de Beauvoir isn't ashamed of being a sex object; on the contrary, she revels in it. Later, she who championed women's equality with men would several times a day put aside whatever she was doing to do the bidding (run to the pharmacy to get cough medicine) of her impossible, life-long love, Jean-Paul Sartre. When a biographer asked de Beauvoir about the contradiction between what she said and what she did, she said, "Real life is messy. I wrote a feminist statement, and then I went on to live my life as I wanted."

Finally, I suspect de Beauvoir would love presenting herself thus because she knew doing so was something many of us--common people, not just artists and exhibitionists--would like to do but lack the guts. I think we would liked to be memorialized naked in a picture or video when we felt our body was beautiful, at the magic age of 27, say, though 42 would do and even later. It's partly the wish to keep something "permanent" of our body from the ongoing train wreck of time. John Wayne said he found it hard to watch the movies he'd made in his 40's because he was so beautiful then; needless to say, he was happy for others to watch them. It's also partly the wish to be known, to be entirely visible yet unashamed. To say, "It's me, this. I'm the person in clothes who you know, and I'm all the things I say and do. But I'm this too. And it's okay. I'm not afraid to be naked to you, and I hope you're not offended."

Annie Leibovitz's photographic session with writer Robert Penn Warren, then 75, hadn't gone well, and both of them must have felt it, because, as Leibovitz was driving away, she saw Warren, in an upstairs window, meaning to be seen, taking off his shirt. She went inside and photographed him naked to the waist.