1 F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 36-54.
2 From an interview with Shahn conducted by Richard Doud, April 14, 1964; quoted in Hurley, Portrait of a Decade, 50.
3 Biographical information from Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Ben Shahn (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972), 345-47.
4 Selden Rodman, Portrait of the Artist as an American (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), 89.
5 Ibid., 90.
6 Ibid., 91.
7 Ibid., xv and 78.
8 From an interview with Shahn conducted by Richard Doud, April 14, 1964, quoted in John D. Morse, ed., Ben Shahn (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 135-36.
9 Some of the killed negatives from Shahn's trip have holes punched in them but others, like this one, do not.
10 From an interview by John D. Morse, "Henri Cartier-Bresson," p. 189 in the Magazine of Art, May 1947, quoted in Morse, Ben Shahn, 134.
11 From an interview by Richard Doud, April 14, 1964, quoted in Davis Pratt, The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), x.
12 The policy matters alluded to here are discussed in Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); and Stephen F. Strausberg, "The Effectiveness of the New Deal in Arkansas," in Donald W. Whisenhunt, The Depression in the Southwest (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980), 102-16.
13 From John D. Morse, "Ben Shahn: An Interview," 136-4l in the Magazine of Art, April 1944, quoted in Morse, Ben Shahn, 133.
14 Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content (1957; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 47 48.
15 Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 263. Cotton -- Page 7