Ben Shahn worked fervently against injustice, prejudice, and oppression all throughout his artistic career. Himself a Jewish immigrant, he focused on uplifting immigrants, American workers, and disenfranchised communities. When he was a young boy in Lithuania, his father was exiled to Siberia for alleged revolutionary activities, and his family was forced to flee the country, eventually resettling in Brooklyn, New York. Shahn’s most well-known work, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931-33), is a series of twenty three paintings that form an investigation into the American justice system. Shahn worked in the style of the Social Realists and frequently depicted scenes of everyday American life that examined broad societal and political concerns of his era. In 1932–1933, Shahn assisted the Mexican artist Diego Rivera on an important series of murals depicting labor and industry for New York’s Rockefeller Center. During the Depression years of the 1930s, Shahn found employment with government relief agencies created by the Roosevelt administration to provide funding to jobless artists. He made paintings for the New York City Public Works Art Project and the Works Progress Administration before turning to photography in 1935 to work with the Farm Security Administration. 

In this original ink drawing, the artist captures a policeman in uniform at work. Depicted from the rear, the angle perfectly captures the uniformed man’s weapon lying on his hip. The burning cigarette in the man’s nearby hand leads the viewer to imagine the ignition of heat, smoke, and the adrenaline rush of the cigarette—and the gun. The policeman’s hand is alert above the gun, waiting to be called to action in any second. While the drawing appears benign in its apparent simplicity, the lines themselves are short and erratic strokes that display a frenetic energy. Always investigating societal sources of power and influence, Shahn frequently drew images of policemen, and when working as a photographer he captured various photographs of policemen (always with hidden faces) and their exposed weapons.    

Born in Lithuania, Ben Shahn immigrated to the United States in 1906. He began his art training as a lithographer. Between 1919 and 1922 he studied biology at New York University, and went on to study art at the City College of New York and the National Academy of Design. Sharing a studio in 1929 with the photographer Walker Evans stimulated Shahn’s own interest in photography and he worked as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1938. He experimented with silkscreening and created magazine illustrations and advertisements. Shahn was a teacher and lecturer at many institutions such as University of Colorado, University of Wisconsin, Black Mountain College, and Harvard University. He had many solo exhibitions during his career and was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers.