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In late September 1935, Shahn left New York City to work for the Resettlement Administration in Washington, D.C. This position gave the artist the opportunity to travel throughout the southern United States for a month, photographing scenes of rural poverty that exposed him to a world far different from the one he had known in New York. The following spring Shahn began preparing for a government-funded mural, his first since the rejection of the Rikers Island Penitentiary project. The mural was commissioned for a public building at Jersey Homesteads (later Roosevelt), New Jersey, a New Deal settlement for Jewish immigrant garment workers who were being relocated from Lower East Side tenements. In April 1936 Shahn returned to New York to do research for this project at the public library, the headquarters for the Associated Press, and the offices of the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper. While in New York, Shahn visited the Lower East Side and made what proved to be one of his most consequential rolls of film. Although the majority of the artist’s New York negatives were posthumously cut apart into individual frames, this intact roll is one of the few early examples of his working process as a street photographer. Shahn began the roll with an array of affectionate portraits of his first two children, Judith and Ezra, whom he visited on occasion following the dissolution of his marriage in 1935. Subsequent images indicate how, as the artist moved through the streets of the Lower East Side, he made numerous exposures of merchants and storefronts that captured his interest. He particularly delighted in the hand-painted signs on store windows, and he celebrated the distinctive lettering as a type of authentic folk art. Once in the darkroom, Shahn made prints from nearly all the frames on this roll, experimenting with cropping, dodging, and burning the images to create finished prints. The focused body of work deriving from the negatives on this roll of film constitutes some of the artist’s most iconic imagery on Depression-era New York. Bowery (New York City), April 1936 Fogg Art Museum, Gift of Bernarda Bryson Shahn.
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