Ben Shahn made two important contributions to the newly formed Historical Section in 1935. First, of course, were the photographs he himself added to the agency's file. The portion dating from 1935 is small--less than 2 percent of the eight-year accumulation--but about one-third of those early images are Shahn's. And second, his counsel, along with that of several colleagues at the Resettlement Administration, helped Roy Stryker clarify his mission.¹ Shahn's sophistication as a painter and printmaker and his keenly felt moral sensibility influenced the running dialogue he had with Stryker. Once, Shahn recalled in 1964, he had explained to Stryker that a certain photograph of soil erosion would not have a strong impact on viewers. "Look Roy," Shahn said, "you're not going to move anybody with this eroded soil--but the effect this eroded soil has on a kid who looks starved, this is going to move people."²

Cotton pickers, Arkansas. LC-USF33-6029-M3

Cotton picker, Arkansas. LC-USF33-6029-M5

Cotton pickers 6:30 a.m., Alexander plantation, Pulaski County, Arkansas. LC-USF33-6086-M2

Born in Lithuania in 1898, Ben Shahn immigrated to New York with his family at the age of six.³ He was apprenticed to a commercial lithographer in 1911, and earned his living in the trade until the early 1930s, when he began to receive recognition as a fine artist. In 1934, after exhibitions of his series of paintings about the Dreyfus and Sacco-Vanzetti affairs, he was commissioned to produce a mural by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The following year, Rexford Tugwell invited Shahn to join the Resettlement Administration. He worked as an artist in the agency's Special Skills Division and was an unofficial, part-time member of Stryker's photographic section. Shahn later told biographer Selden Rodman that his chief duty was "to explain in posters to the people who need it what is being done for them and to the others what they are paying for."⁴

For a while, Shahn had shared a Manhattan studio with the photographer Walker Evans. In 1933, when Shahn's younger brother paid off a wager with a Leica camera, the painter turned to Evans for instruction in its use. Shahn recalled that the first lesson was delivered as Evans dashed out the door on his way to a photographic assignment and consisted of the shouted instruction, "f9 for the bright side of the street, f4.5 for the shady side!"⁵ He received more lessons from Evans in the Cape Cod community of Truro where they spent their summers, but he never attempted to master the meticulous, view-camera approach Evans favored.

Cotton on porch of sharecropper's home, Maria plantation, Arkansas. LC-USF33-6050-M5

Picking cotton on Alexander plantation, Pulaski County, Arkansas. LC-USF33-6217-M2

Young cotton picker, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Schools for colored children do not open until January 1st so as not to interfere with cotton picking. LC-USF33-6218-M5

Shahn's casual attitude about matters of photographic technique stemmed from his use of photographs as a basis for drawings and paintings. He tended to think of his compact 35-mm Leica as a mechanical sketchpad. Despite the fact that some of his Resettlement Administration photographs were exhibited as early as 1936, Shahn continued to insist that they "weren't just photographs to me: in a real sense they were the raw materials of painting."⁶ His drawings and paintings from the period include elements from his photographs and at least two include self portraits of Shahn holding a Leica with a right-angle viewfinder, a device that permits the photographer to face in one direction while pointing the camera in another.⁷

The photographs presented here have been drawn from the body of work Shahn produced during a two- or three-month trip through the South and Midwest in the fall of 1935. He and his wife, the artist Bernarda Bryson, made the trek in Shahn's Model A. The Special Skills Division paid the travel costs, but Stryker furnished film and laboratory services and encouraged Shahn to take photographs. Shahn described the trip to an interviewer in 1964.

It was suggested that I first take a trip around the country in the areas in which [the Resettlement Administration] worked--to see what it was all about. And I tell you that was a revelation to me. My experience had been all European. I had been in Europe for four years. I studied there, and my knowledge of the United States came via New York and mostly through Union Square.⁸

Weighing in cotton. LC-USF33-6020-M2

At the end of the day. LC-USF33-6022-M5

Tally at the weigh station. LC-USF33-6020-M1

The file contains 123 photographs from the Arkansas portion of the trip, ranging from urban scenes in West Memphis to images of mountaineers in the Ozarks. The 15 photographs presented here have been selected from two groups made in Pulaski County: a group of 28 photographs depicting cotton pickers at work--most appear to have been made on the Alexander Plantation near Scott--and a group of 19 pictures made on a Sunday in a sharecroppers' community in or near Little Rock. The photograph of the four pickers along the road at day's end was selected from the collection's killed negatives.⁹ Shahn's photographs have something of the quality of sketches. The plane of focus is not always on the subject of greatest interest, shadows or objects occasionally obscure important pictorial elements, and some images have been framed in a loose or imprecise way, reflecting Shahn's view of his photographs as instrumental and his belief that content was more important than form or technique. His praise for the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson may be read as stating his own goals. "The thing that makes them memorable is their content," Shahn said. "To me, [Cartier-Bresson] is supremely the artist when he is looking for his subject. The rest is mechanical. The feeling for the subject and the ability to know just when to press the shutter--that is not mechanical."¹⁰

The photographs show how Shahn moved through and around the scene as he made a set of exposures. At the building where the pickers congregated at the start of the day, for example, the overall coverage includes a wide-perspective establishing shot, medium shots of little groups of pickers, and a near close-up of a man sitting on the stoop. This use of motion picture terminology would be agreeable to Shahn, who once likened his photography of a country auction to the creation of a movie script. "I'd first go out and photograph all the signs on the telegraph poles," Shahn said, "and then get the people gathering, and all kinds of details of them, and then examine the things, and the auctioneer, and so forth."¹¹ Shahn may have used his right-angle viewfinder when he photographed this series; if so, the fact that the photographer was facing in another direction did not keep the nursing mother from fixing him with a penetrating stare.

Going home. LC-USF33-6221-M2

Sharecropper at home on Sunday. LC-USF33-6026-M1

Sharecropper's family. LC-USF33-6026-M3

Shahn set off with neither a specific photographic assignment nor a social science lesson from Stryker, who typically wanted his photographers to be well-informed about their subject matter and the agency's policies and activities. There would have been plenty for Stryker and Shahn to discuss concerning cotton and Arkansas. Beginning in 1933, the Agriculture Adjustment Administration had tried to counteract a badly depressed cotton market by paying planters not to grow the commodity. This federal program benefited large landowners and displaced small farmers, tenants, sharecroppers, and farm laborers, forcing many of them to take less-secure and lower-paying work as wage hands. No state suffered more than Arkansas, where, by the spring of 1935, conditions were so bad that the newly formed Southern Tenant Farmers Union called a strike. The entire issue focused attention on the need for rural assistance and rehabilitation, contributing in an important way to Roosevelt's establishment of the Resettlement Administration.¹²

Shahn, no doubt aware of the controversy over cotton policy if not familiar with its details, would certainly have been conscious of the association between the crop and the blacks who had worked it since the time of slavery. Remarks he made years later suggest that he was drawn toward general social and political issues but not that concerned about the intricacies of agricultural policy and the Resettlement Administration's programs. In a 1944 interview, Shahn described the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration undertakings as "helping the underprivileged" and as having "only one purpose--a moral one."¹³ The photographs of the cotton pickers can serve as a report on the effects of an economic system just as the picture of a starving child can be read as showing the end result of soil erosion. In 1957, Shahn reflected on the lessons he had learned about the diversity of individuals and the complexity of regional differences.

I had then [in the late 1930s] crossed and recrossed many section of the country, and had come to know well so many people of all kinds of belief and temperament, which they maintained with a transcendent indifference to their lot in life. Theories had melted before such experience. My own painting then had turned from what is called "social realism" into a sort of personal realism . . . . There were the poor who were rich in spirit, and the rich who were also sometimes rich in spirit. There was the South and its storytelling art, stories of snakes and storms and haunted houses, enchanting; and yet such talent thriving in the same human shell with hopeless prejudices, bigotry, and ignorance.¹⁴

Sunday on the porch. LC-USF33-6025-M3

Mother and child. LC-USF33-6023-M5

After church. LC-USF33-6025-M5

Shahn's concern was for the individual. The individual was also the chief focus of Resettlement Administration programs and Farm Security Administration programs. The essential significance of the agencies' programs resided, historian Sidney Baldwin has written, not in their effect on the agricultural marketplace, but rather "in the human condition of the people served and on the lives of the rural communities in which they operated."¹⁵ Thus the spirit of Ben Shahn's photographs perfectly fits the spirit of the agency.