Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
BEN SHAHNBeing an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
BEN SHAHNThe time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn’t have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn’t get as far as Hoboken at that time.
BEN SHAHNI’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
BEN SHAHNI love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
BEN SHAHNTo abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
BEN SHAHNI was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.
BEN SHAHNOf course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.
BEN SHAHNIf you’re going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art.
BEN SHAHNWhen you talk about war on poverty it doesn’t mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.
BEN SHAHNNobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it’s called documentary, which I suppose is all right … We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.
BEN SHAHNI was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.
BEN SHAHNEach artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.
BEN SHAHNThe artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
BEN SHAHNIt is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.
BEN SHAHNIt is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.
BEN SHAHNOnly an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
BEN SHAHN