Candid Camera

THE WORLD, some say, is wonderful in the eyes of the innocent. If there is any truth to this notion, Ben Shahn's photographs should be taken as the finest sort of proof. Shahn was not a photographer by profession, but the photographs which he made on the occasions when he did pick up a camera are graceful, articulate and humorous in the most sophisticated of ways.

His working style was simply that of a slightly-more-proficient-than-average snapshooter. He used no equipment other than a 35mm camera that had been given to him as a gift and he preferred to photograph his subjects in a candid fashion, without any of the psychological probing of serious portraiture.

The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn collects pictures taken in the 1930's. Shahn began by photographing people in the streets of New York's Lower East Side. Later, when the Federal government gave him a job, he took pictures of sharecroppers and farmers and small-town people in Appalachia, the Ozarks, and Ohio. When he didn't photograph people, he photographed the artifacts which were closest to them--the circus posters which advertised their entertainments or their hand-painted signs with messages like "This is the car HOOVER promised ME, ROOSEVELT gave ME, FOR GODS SAKE DON'T LET LANDON TAKE IT AWAY." The only difference between his subjects and the ones which fill thousands of snapshot albums is that none of Shahn's people could have afforded to keep an album of their own.

But if Shahn's working approach was primitive, his visual sense was not. By trade he was a painter and graphic artist of considerable reputation; in person he was a close friend and one-time roommate of the late Walker Evans.

A photograph like "Mrs. Mulhall and Child, Ozark Family, Arkansas, 1935" may seem casually taken, yet it is a perfect picture. The mother, child and doll are incongruous in size, expression, and surface texture. They are also rather desperately poor. Another photograph of these subjects could have been chaotic or shocking or both; Shahn's is tied together formally by intricate series of triangular rhythms and rescued from pathos by the contentment of the child and the alert concern of its mother.

Such an ability to record rhythmic and warmly insightful juxtapositions is the genius of Shahn's photographs. They differ considerably from most of the best photography done in America during his era; these are gay documents of a world that the more gravely-inclined have seen as lonely and tragic. The difference may betray a lack of seriousness that prevents Shahn's work from being ranked with truly great photographers like Evans. But serious analysis is only one photographic possibility; Shahn was simply interested in seeing things wonderfully.