Creativity Quote by Ben Shahn

There is a quiet revolt tucked into Shahn's plainspoken sentence: a modern artist refusing to let a supposedly modern medium dictate the terms of seeing. Photography, in the early 20th century, promised immediacy and truth, but it also came with a built-in script - the camera’s optics, the split-second of exposure, the social assumption that a photograph is evidence. Shahn’s line isn’t anti-photography so much as suspicious of how quickly it can become an authority.

The repetition of "I felt" matters. He’s not making a manifesto; he’s describing a lived constraint. That insistence on feeling signals the subtext: the battle is internal as much as technical. Artists of Shahn’s generation were navigating a world where mechanical reproduction was reshaping public attention - magazines, advertising, documentary images of poverty and war. Shahn himself worked in a documentary ecosystem (including government projects) where photographs circulated as persuasive artifacts. In that context, "control" isn’t just about brush versus lens; it’s about authorship.

"Choices" is the hinge word. Painting, drawing, and printmaking let him edit time, rearrange emphasis, push a face toward emblem, turn reportage into moral argument. Photography can be framed, staged, cropped, but it still carries the friction of the real - a stubborn attachment to what was in front of the lens. Shahn is claiming the right to interpret rather than merely record, to make an image that confesses its construction. The statement lands as a defense of art as deliberate intervention: not neutral witness, but accountable voice.