The Photographers Arthur Rothstein e Ben Shahn by Maurizio Berlincioni It would be impossible to enter into the details of every single photographer involved in the work of the FSA, but I believe it necessary to dwell at least on those who, for their attitude and style, can be considered from our point of view the two key figures in the project - Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Before speaking of these two figures and without meaning any disrespect to the others, it is however necessary to remember the contribution of Arthur Rothstein, one of the most noteworthy photographers of the FSA, who afterwards became artistic director of the magazine LOOK, author of the very famous photo The Dust Bowl (a picture in which father and son defy a sand storm in the fields of Oklahoma), and also of the painter Ben Shahn who, from 1931 and for two years, shared with Walker Evans a house in Greenwich Village and his studio at Cape Cod; the photographs, taken with a Leica equipped with a right-angle view-finder that enabled him to point the camera at his subjgcts without them realising it, were truly beautiful. In this way he produced many portraits, apparently without pretence. At a superficial glance they seem like simple snapshots. In reality many of them, for all their transience, are charged with an almost sculptural potency, reminiscent of works by Cartier Bresson of whom Shahn was a great admirer. Within FSA, Ben Shahn holds a clearly defined political position, decisively more left wing, in a Marxian sense, with regards to the way of thinking and operating of Dorothea Lange who orientated her work towards a sociological direction of reform. Great authority on Mexican art, friend of Diego Rivera with whom he worked on the mural Man at the Crossroads of the Rockfeller Centre, Shahn enacts a continual exchange between these two creative trends, that of the painter and that of the photographer: his painting boasts evident traces of his photographic work, but one has to be careful not to make the grave mistake of establishing a hierarchy within the two pursuits as, at the root of working with two different mediums, there exists plainly just the one creative mind that decides every now and again the utilisation of one or the other sign language. His way of telling stories through pictures is characterised by a broad liberality and it's precisely in this narrative freedom that his deep knowledge of class relations and problems manifests itself (he witnessed the great civil struggle in the years 1931-1932 fought in defence of the two anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti). Also apparent is his desire not to confer on his work, through a conscious and concise choice, a foundation a-priori closed and defined. While Evans tended to concentrate on a single picture the synthesis of his narrative and Lange decided to distribute her tale through small clusters of skilfully organised pictures as we shall see later, Shahn because of his cultural and political matrix refuses the role of the intellectual who judges and manipulates the contexts within which he finds himself operating and therefore leaves his subjects free without creating orders or hierarchies. (© 1997 M.Berlincioni) Bibliography Photojournalist On Line Photojournalism and Photography E-mail:fotoreporter@catpress.com Via Faentina 127 - 50133 Florence, Italy ph. (+39) 055 575488 - fax (+39) 055 587321 © Photojournalist On Line, 1997 - All rights reserved.