John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

Review: John Raeburn, "Ben Shahn's American Scene: Photographs, 1938"

In 1938, Ben Shahn traveled the back roads of central Ohio, hoping to discover the "average American." He was on a three-month assignment for Roy Stryker's legendary photo documentary project, which was a unit of the federal government's Farm Security Administration [FSA]. He'd worked as a photographer for Stryker on... Read more →

Ben Shahn, with Leica and Right-Angle Viewfinder

Ben Shahn loved his Leica. To be more precise, he loved what he could do with it, especially when outfitted with a right-angle viewfinder. In my last post, I talked about Shahn's 1935 encounter with a traveling medicine show in a small town in Tennessee and showed several of the... Read more →

Ben Shahn and the Medicine Show, Huntingdon, Tennessee, 1935

This is not a slave auction. After all, the photo was made in 1935, 70 years after emancipation. But our twenty-first century eyes might have trouble figuring out exactly what's going on. The photographer, Ben Shahn, would have recognized the scene immediately. It's a traveling medicine show, a once popular... Read more →

W. Eugene Smith Shoots Charlie Chaplin, 1952

Every time I decide not to renew my subscription to American Photo magazine, it publishes something that stops me in my tracks. This time, it's a story by a dead man. The man is the brilliant, complicated, self-destructive W. Eugene Smith, and the story is a never-before-published piece about a... Read more →