Ben Shahn Quotes

56 quotes in 794 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
• Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
• I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
• To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds…
• An ametuer is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable…
• 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,…
• I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
• How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
• All art is based on non-conformity.
• I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.
• I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own…
• 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…
• It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today,…
• We tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner. But that's the paradox because the only thing extraordinary about it was that it was…
• If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me…
• I love chaos.... It's the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
• Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.
• It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it…

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