Ben Shahn

Ben Shahn (1898-1969) was an American photographer, painter and graphic artist who was born in Lithuania to a family of wood carvers. In 1906, his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn. Shahn studied at New York University and the National Academy of Design where he slowly gained recognition as a painter and graphic designer. In the early 1930s, Shahn shared a Greenwich studio with photographer, Walker Evans, from whom he learned much of the technical craft of photography. It was not long after that Shahn began to discover that taking a photograph brought a certain amount of creative satisfaction and he began to split his time between taking photographs and working on his paintings and drawings. At the end of his lifetime, Shah achieved international acclaim for his paintings but his photographic work remained mostly unknown until the landmark exhibition, Ben Shahn as Photographer at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum just after his death in 1969. Today Ben Shahn’s photographs are included in numerous museums and private collections in the United States and abroad.