Ben Shahn’s American Scene: Photographs, 1938 by John Raeburn (review)

Raeburn continues his research on 1930’s American photography with his new book, covering Shahn’s work on small town America with the Farm Security Administration’s Historical Section. Although Shahn’s assignment from director Roy Stryker had originally been the “harvest in Ohio,” Shahn’s photographs of small town life grew to represent the largest portion of images. Loosely based on Stryker’s guidelines for what to photograph in order to document the “average American” in the face of fascist threats overseas, Shahn delivers views which are occasionally poignant—but most often quotidian—at least compared to some of his more famous Depression-era images which immediately spring to mind; therefore, it is quite helpful to have Raeburn as a guide.

The book is organized thematically with chapters devoted to the main street, sidewalks, modernity, the poor, and race, although the chapters are certainly interconnected by recurring motifs: people gathered to chat on the streets, vernacular shop windows and signs, and cars parked on small town streets, for example. The town squares of Shahn’s images are unexceptional-looking, which Raeburn reports is part of Shahn’s compositional strategy to emphasize “the built environment’s banality and imply the town’s enervation” (50). In Shahn’s view, the small town, despite the arrival of the automobile, had entered a “period of decline” represented in its “disused public spaces” (2); one certainly feels that quality in many of the images. Raeburn also argues that Shahn, following the intelligentsia’s assumption (and Stryker’s shooting script) that “small towns were a bedrock of stable tradition” (132), avoided images of modernity’s encroachments (new car dealers, chain department stores, and ubiquitous movie theaters).

Shahn himself seems to have deliberately avoided photographing certain public institutions, like schools and libraries, in favor of groups on the street, in part, Raeburn argues, because citizens’ interactions with each other were more indicative of small town America in the photographer’s opinion. Shahn shot using a 35-mm Leica equipped with a right-angle viewfinder, meaning that he could photograph people surreptitiously. Raeburn points out that one can even see the photographer’s reflection in the plate glass windows! For that reason, I wish that Raeburn had commented more directly on whether he thought that the right-angle viewfinder was in use for the shantytown pictures (no plate glass here to reflect the photographer), as these images most strongly recall the more familiar images. In contrast, the author argues quite strongly that the tricky viewfinder was not in use for the mesmerizing picture of the itinerant African-American tintypist—one of the strongest in Shahn’s series. Both Shahn and Raeburn excel in addressing controversial issues of race and class which were not specifically on Stryker’s shooting script but were clearly on Shahn’s mind.

My regret for the book lies with the images; although there are a hundred, the reproductions are quite middle grey and not keyed to Library of Congress locator numbers; however, Raeburn’s book will certainly assist many, as these images do not reveal themselves quickly nor easily.