In May 1938, Ben Shahn—painter, muralist, graphic artist, and photographer—was made “Principal Photographer” in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) by the department’s head, the agricultural economist and photographer Roy Stryker. Shahn thus joined the top rank of Stryker’s principal field lieutenants, who included Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. By documenting the dire situation of farmers devastated by Dust Bowl drought and the ruinous economic Depression, they were serving President Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to resettle agricultural workers. Shahn had already photographed the plight of sharecroppers in the Ozarks and throughout the South in 1935 and resettlement efforts there in 1937, but 1938 would bring a different kind of assignment, and it would have a direct impact on his further development as a painter.

Shahn told Stryker that he wished to make a sweeping portrait of “the average American” now and would focus on residents of a dozen or so small towns around Columbus, Ohio, near his wife’s hometown. [1] Both men agreed that the FSA had already focused so much of its work on the Depression’s casualties that it had overlooked the story of small town folk who had sustained community and traditions in hard times. In 1938 the impulse to record this side of the American experiment was driven by a widely recognized need to counter the rising tide of fascism abroad with a message underscoring the unshakable strength of the great democratic institution that was Main Street, Small Town, U.S.A. [2]

Shahn’s collective portrait of small town Ohio would be his most ambitious FSA project—numbering nearly three thousand images. So consuming an effort through the summer months of 1938 would understandably shape the painter’s psyche in its aftermath.

Shahn came to paint what he called a new “personal realism,” different from “social realism,” he explained, based not on a program but on observation. [3] In his photographic record he had made notes, provided captions, even followed Stryker’s “script” in shaping a story of small-town people to some degree. Painting, he came to see, could bestow greater nuance and ambiguity on a subject, suggesting not just timely circumstances, and not just an idea of American character, but a deep probing of the human soul. Soon after the Ohio project, Shahn abandoned photography, yet the lessons provided by his practice there, the candidness and lack of affectation he captured through snapshot photography, had proved, he said, “a very helpful thing in the whole quality of my work.” [4]

Shahn memorialized his photographic work in t he 1939 painting, Self-Portrait Among Churchgoers (courtesy Crystal Bridges

Museum of American Art), in which he depicts himself with his hand-held Leica camera photographing amid Sunday worshippers. In their quietude they take no notice of the stranger among them who appears innocuously to be snapping random shots of subjects beyond the church. But Shahn is here revealing the secret of his practice—the essential secret of the Ohio series’ intense, up-close look at these American faces, faces like that of the contemplative old man in the intimate painted portrait that is American Couple. Shahn’s small Leica easily fit into his pocket, and it was always at the ready. His trick was that he had fitted the camera with a right-angle view finder that, when deployed, allowed him to face ninety degrees away from his unsuspecting subjects as he took their pictures. We see him using it in his reflection caught in the snapshot of a

pair of Circleville, Ohio, denizens idling on an afternoon and eyeing the action of the odd photographer before them, unaware that it is they who are his subjects (Street Scene, Circleville, Ohio, 1938; Library of Congress). [5] One could well have provided the face that fills the page in American Couple. Shahn wanted in his photographic portraits complete candidness, a total lack of self-consciousness, especially in such penetrating close-ups, and he succeeded throughout the series by his surreptitious methods.

Who are the “American Couple”? They might be churchgoers. Or, more poignantly, perhaps they are sober spectators at a neighbor’s foreclosure auction, or patriotic on-lookers at a veteran’s parade, or the stoic needy waiting to receive relief commodities (Waiting for Relief Commodities, Urbana, Ohio, 1938; Library of Congress)—Shahn recorded all of these small town moments and more in 1938 in close-up photographs of small town folk unchecked, but briefly, by the impulse to keep up appearances.

Mural projects consumed Shahn over the next three years. Among them was the commission he won from the U.S. Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts in October 1940 to paint frescoes in the main corridor of what was to be the new Social Security Building in Washington, D.C., the physical embodiment of the sweeping reform act that Roosevelt had signed into law in 1935. “I am proud to put a face on it” Shahn wrote to Section head Edward Bruce. [6] As Shahn conceived it, one half of the series would revisit the need for government-mandated social and economic reforms, and the other half would celebrate the outcomes, a domestic and industrial building boom chief among them. “People want decent homes to live in; they want to locate them where they can engage in productive work; and they want some safeguards against misfortune which cannot be wholly eliminated from this man-made world of ours,” Roosevelt had said of the tenets of social security. [7] Study for “The Meaning of Social Security”, is Shahn’s tempera for that segment of the mural that would celebrate these aspirations.

In 1944 Shahn was called upon to lead a new graphic art division of the political action committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO-PAC), having produced posters and pamphlets for the union ever since its founding years earlier. The immediate goal of the CIOPAC was to reelect Roosevelt for a fourth term, but it also aimed to become a permanent pro-labor political organization. The graphic arts, Shahn knew, offered the widest possible reach, and he threw himself into fully applying all of his communicative skill and exploiting all the varying forms of printing arts on behalf of both Roosevelt and American working men and women. He directed a team of likeminded artists and writers in the development of posters to

advance the crusade. In those heady days, Shahn worked alongside F. Palmer Weber, a political philosopher by training and a life-long civil rights activist. [8] His bold graphic symbol of power in solidarity, Three Hands—one brown, one black, one white—was the artist’s gift to Weber.

— Patricia Junker

[1] Shahn wrote little on the project but recorded his intention in an interview with Richard Doud, April 14, 1962, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. See John Raeburn on the Ohio project in Ben Shahn’s American Scene: Photographs 1938 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 5, 183n2.

[2] The term had been invoked by Stryker in his insistence on realizing a collective portrait of democratic life; Raeburn, 5–7, 184n7.

[3] Shahn, in his lectures on theory and practice, The Shape of Content (1975), quoted in Howard Greenfeld, Ben Shahn: An Artist’s Life (New York: Random House, 1998), 151.

[4] Shahn, quoted in Raeburn, 16.

[5] A full description of Shahn’s technique is found in Raeburn, 15–16.

[6] Shahn to Bruce, quoted in U.S. General Services Administration, “Fine Arts Collection: The Meaning of Social Security,” art.gsa.gov/artworks/637/the-meaning-of-social-security.

[7] From President Roosevelt’s address, June 8, 1934, quoted in Living New Deal/Cohen Federal Building: Shahn Frescoes—Washington, D.C., livingnewdeal.rg/sites/wilbur-j-cohen-building-shahn-frescoes-washington-dc. The Social Security Administration never occupied the building. It is now the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building.

[8] See Greenfeld, 132–33, 197–208.