Ben Shahn (1898-1969) was born in Lithuania, where his family lived in poverty in the small city of Kovno. Around 1904 they immigrated to New York. 

He first worked as an apprentice to a commercial lithographer, acquiring skills that would later support him financially while he pursued his ambition to be a painter. Shahn's initial interest in photography stemmed from his use of the medium as a reference tool for his paintings.

In the 1930s, Shahn was employed as an artist at the Resettlement Administration in Washington DC, where from 1935 to 1938 he also worked in a part-time position in Roy Stryker's Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography program. Shahn exploited the portability of the 35mm camera to capture his subjects in an informal and spontaneous manner; he used a Leica with a right-angle viewfinder that enabled him to photograph subjects without their knowledge. But the best examples of his work from this period are portraits in which his subjects engaged with the photographer, such as the images here. 

In addition to his photographic work for the FSA, Shahn later established a reputation as a leading American realist painter. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, and he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1954. 

Once his painting career was established, Shahn lost interest in photography. But a resurgence of interests in that work led to the publication in 2008 of two collections of his photographs from the Great Depression. In “Fields of Vision: The Photographs of Ben Shahn” by Timothy Egan, the author draws a direct parallel between the narrative content of Shahn's FSA images and his oft-stated, ambiguous claim about tales from his Lithuanian childhood: “Most facts are lies. All stories are true.” The images here were recently made available through the New York Public Library's Digital Collections.