Time & Perspective Quote by Ben Shahn

Shahn’s mild, almost offhand sentence is doing quiet boundary-work. The repetition of "I did" has the cadence of a deposition: not defensive exactly, but careful, a record set straight before someone else narrates it for him. He’s talking about speed - the camera as a practical fix for a world that won’t slow down long enough to be sketched - yet the real tension is between methods and identities. Drawing implies interpretation, the artist’s hand making decisions in public. Photography, especially in the 1930s documentary boom, carried a different claim: evidence, immediacy, the look of truth.

That’s where Roy Stryker comes in. Stryker ran the Farm Security Administration’s famed photography unit, an "outfit" that was as much editorial machine as benevolent mission, shaping a national story of hardship and resilience. Shahn worked alongside that ecosystem but insists he wasn’t inside it. "Not part of Stryker’s outfit at all" is a line drawn against institutional authorship: I used the tool, I shared the terrain, but I didn’t sign away my gaze.

The subtext is artistic autonomy in an era when images were becoming policy instruments. Shahn wants credit for hybridity - sketching and shooting - without being folded into the mythology of the FSA archive. It’s also a reminder that documentary work isn’t just about what’s in the frame; it’s about who controls the assignment, the caption, the distribution. Shahn’s camera is less a badge of belonging than a way to keep moving while staying himself.