Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times

Synopsis

Ben Shahn (1898-1964) was at once a painter and photographer who claimed himself not to make a distinction between the two, though the critics and scholars have always given privilege to the paintings. Shahn preferred the hand-held 35mm Leica and an anglefinder (a device like a periscope that allowed him to photograph people without pointing his camera at them) to the cumbersome large-format cameras. He shot what he called the "living theatre"-the unconscious expression of working class and immigrant populations on NYC streets-and left a poignant record of the worst years of the Great Depression. The point this really good book makes is that, paintings aside, Shahn's photographs have strong impact and intrinsic value. Shahn's view of NYC ignores the skyscrapers and bridges that many of his contemporaries fixed on and gives us NYC at street level, eye level.