Ben Shahn: A New Deal Photographer in the Old South

This dissertation proposes a critical study of a group of photographs that Ben Shahn made for the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA) in the American South in the autumn of 1935. As a social artist and an ardent supporter of New Deal initiatives, Shahn was particularly well-suited to serve the federal government. As a humanitarian he was highly motivated to help the victims of poverty and discrimination that he encountered in the South. This dissertation examines how the Roosevelt administration used photography to promote relief and reform programs, especially to assist the rural South; and how to this end, Shahn's photographs were effective. Moreover, this study confirms Shahn's professional status as a photographer, dispelling the general perception that he used photography merely as source material for later paintings, posters and murals.
Chapter I details the evolution of the Resettlement Administration, its photography project, Shahn's commitment to the social basis of art, why his politics were relevant and useful for New Deal initiatives and Shahn's motives vis-a-vis revisionist critiques of documentary truth and "victim" photography. Chapters II-V are devoted to examining the photographs and the social and historical conditions observed and documented by Shahn. Chapter II examines Shahn's photographs of the culture and livelihood of mountaineers living in the southern Appalachian and Ozark regions. Chapter III is devoted to the photographs which document agrarian capitalism as practiced in cotton production. It opens with a discussion of how racial segregation came to underlie southern labor practice. Chapter IV shows how Shahn's sociological approach was appropriate and sensitive to Protestant Christianity and its contradictory role in southern capitulation and survival. Chapter V concerns the southern preoccupation with the past and the rhetoric of loss, and how these factors are manifested in images that Shahn made along the Mississippi River. Shahn was active as a photographer only in the 1930s, but as this dissertation attests during those years and especially in 1935 he produced photographs that were in many ways more interesting than his paintings.