Gips, Terry.Close Enough: Photography by David Seymour
(Chim). College Park: University of Maryland Art Gal-
lery, 1999.
Manchester, William, with Fred Ritchin, Jean Lacouture.
In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photogra-
phers. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.
Miller, Russell.Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of
History. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1999.
Soria, George.Robert Capa, David Seymour—Chim: les
grandes photos de la guerre d’Espagne. Paris: E ́ditions
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WebsitesInternational Center of Photography. A Web Biography of
David Seymour: http://www.icp.org/chim
Magnum Photos: http://www.magnumphotos.com
The David Seymour Portfolio: http://www.davidseymour.
comBEN SHAHN
American
Ben Shahn, primarily a painter, devoted only six
years to photography, documenting American life
during the Great Depression as a photographer for
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Farm
Security Administration (FSA). Capturing both
urban and rural life, Shahn portrayed his subjects
with sympathy and compassion, and, considering
them people very similar to himself, often devel-
oped a close relationship with them. His photo-
graphs express human strengths and values, rather
than evoking pity or shock for the inequalities of
the working class.
Born in Lithuania in 1898, Ben Shahn immi-
grated to New York with his family in 1906. In
1913, he apprenticed as a lithographer, and by the
early 1930s he had gained a sizable reputation as a
painter concerned with social injustice. Although
Shahn had yet to take up the camera, his early
gouaches owed much to photography. In preparing
his early series of paintings—The Dreyfus Case
(1931),The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti(1932),
andTom Mooney(1933)—Shahn relied heavily on
photographs of the protagonists. His interest in
photography was furthered by his friendship with
Walker Evans. The two met in 1929, and they sub-
sequently shared a studio. Although Shahn would
later claim that Evans’s only advice was, ‘‘f/9 on the
sunny side of the street. f/45 on the shady side of the
street. For 1/20th of a second hold your camera
steady’’ (Morse 1972), Shahn’s exposure to Evans’s
working practices was formative. Evans also intro-
duced Shahn to the work of his contemporaries
Henri Cartier-Bresson and Euge`ne Atget, as well
as that of pioneering social justice photographer
Lewis Hine and famed Civil War photographer
Mathew Brady.
Shahn’s first photographs were taken in New
York. Frustrated by his attempts to sketch a blind
accordion player, he borrowed $25 from his brother
and purchased a Leica and a right-angled viewfind-
er. While assisting Mexican muralist Diego Rivera
on the ill-fated Rockefeller Center mural, he began
to photograph city life and soon came to appreciate
the camera’s ability to capture the fleeting and
ephemeral. His first photographs were published
inNew Theater(November 1934) under the title
‘‘Scenes from the Living Theater—Sidewalks of
New York.’’ Shunning the modernism of Alfred
Steiglitz, Charles Sheeler, and Berenice Abbott,
who were also extensively photographing New
York, Shahn focused on the lives of the city’s ordin-
ary inhabitants: on the faces, not the fac ̧ades, of the
modern metropolis. He fixed his gaze on the ethnic,
working classes of lower Manhattan, photograph-
ing storefronts, meeting spots, and playgrounds,
not the city’s immense skyscrapers or bridges.
In 1935, Shahn was hired to design posters,
pamphlets, and murals for the Special Skills Divi-
sion of Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration
(later known as the Farm Security Administration
(FSA). Almost immediately, however, Shahn was
loaned out to Roy Stryker’s Historical Section. As
Hank O’Neal notes, ‘‘More than anyone else he
showed Stryker that the photographs in the file
could be more than history; they could be propa-
ganda’’ (O’Neal 1976). Shahn himself took pho-SHAHN, BEN