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Shahn used photographs in his art throughout his career, for both composition and content. He kept well-organized files of clipped news photos and from 1935 to 1938 was a staff photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), also known as the Resettlement Administration. In many ways it was a dream job, giving Shahn the chance to travel through Depression-era America taking pictures that he said "cried out to be taken." He used these photographs for his paintings for years afterwards. However, using photographs for paintings was still a suspect practice during Shahn’s time, and many people felt that it diminished the value of a painting if it was "copied" in any way from a photo. Shahn and his supporters were disturbed by a 1946 article in U.S. Camera that put Shahn’s photos and paintings side by side, and he made sure to never exhibit them that way himself. |
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"Scotts Run, West Virginia" is one example of the almost collage-style technique Shahn often used. Two of the photographs that he drew from were taken in the town of Scott’s Run; the third was taken three years later. He flipped one photo, and cropped another, then put it all together in a new composition. What remains is the "documentary" detail. Although the great majority of photographs Shahn took while working as an FSA photographer were his own choices, in this case he had been asked to take pictures of a new housing development the Resettlement Administration had built. He described the experience in an essay he wrote in 1944 about his forays as a photographer.
"Scotts Run, West Virginia" (1937) " …I remember the first place I went to on this trip where we were active, one of the resettlements that we built. I found that as far as I was concerned, they were impossible to photograph. Neat little rows of houses. This wasn’t my idea of something fun to photograph at all. But I had the good luck to ask someone, " Where are you all from? Where did they bring you from?" And when he told me, I went on to a place called Scott’s Run, and there it began. From there I went all through Kentucky, West Virginia, down to Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana—in other words, I covered the mine country and the cotton country. I was terribly excited about it, and did no painting at all in that time. This was it, I thought. I’m sort of a single track guy, anyway. When I’m off on photography, photography is it, and I thought this would be the career for the rest of my life." From "Photography" by Ben Shahn (1944) |
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