Time & Perspective Quote by Ben Shahn

Shahn’s confession lands with the sly candor of someone admitting where the real action was. Arriving in Washington “to begin my job” sounds dutiful, even bureaucratic, but he immediately swerves: he “would have preferred” Roy Stryker, the hard-nosed architect of the FSA photography unit, over his own “more artistic” department. That little qualification - “if you wish” - is doing pointed work. It deflates the sanctimony of capital-A Art and suggests Shahn already knew that in the New Deal machine, images that mattered weren’t the precious ones; they were the ones that could circulate, persuade, and attach a human face to policy.

Context sharpens the stakes. Shahn straddled mediums and missions: a painter and graphic artist who understood propaganda without being reduced to it. Stryker’s operation wasn’t a bohemian salon; it was a state-backed storytelling factory, producing photographs meant to make economic crisis legible to the public. By saying he’d rather be there, Shahn signals impatience with “artistic” isolation and a hunger for the documentary punch photography could deliver - fast, reproducible, politically useful.

Subtext: he’s also admitting an aesthetic envy. The FSA photographers were redefining realism in real time, turning government work into a canon. Shahn’s line quietly reframes ambition: not to escape bureaucracy into art, but to use bureaucracy as a distribution channel for art’s moral urgency.