Ben Shahn

“I confess that Roy was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time.”

“When 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.”

“I didn't care where my works were published.”

“Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?”

“An amateur is someone who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.”

“It used to be twelve people crowded around a sewing table; now it's ten.”

“I did take my camera along, as I felt there wouldn't be enough time to draw the things I wanted to do. I did some drawing and did a lot of photography but I was not part of Stryker's outfit at all.”

“Now, when I came on to Washington to begin my job, I was so interested in photography at that time that I really would have preferred to work with Stryker than with my department, which was more artistic if you wish.”

“I've been asked a great deal about the influence I've had with my work and it's impossible to say, you know.”

“It's pretty hard to measure influence of written or visual material.”

“I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.”

“In the South or in the mine country, wherever you point the camera there is a picture.”

“The 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.”

“Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.”

“Roy was just another bureaucrat to me, but I realized very soon that without Roy this thing would have died.”

“Whatever I get involved in, I'm totally involved, you see.”

“I remember traveling around in Arkansas with Senator Robinson, and I told him what this little trick was. He felt very much part of it and had me take pictures of people unbeknownst to them.”

“I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.”

“Of 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.”

“I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.”