Source
Ben Shahn
Citation
Ben Shahn. Wikipedia. Fetched 2026-05-09 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shahn.
Tier justification
Tier 3: Wikipedia is pointer-only per CREDIBILITY.md. Used here for day-month tokens (September 12 / March 14), the Kovno (Kaunas) birthplace and New York City place-of-death tokens, the Family-of-Man plate-source identification, and the documentary detail that only part of the original frame was used in the FoM blow-up.
Key excerpts / pages
Verbatim claims from the article (fetched 2026-05-09; opening sentence, infobox, and Family-of-Man paragraph):
- Opening sentence: “Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 – March 14, 1969) was an American artist.”
- Infobox: Born “Benjamin Shahn”, “September 12, 1898” in “Kovno, Russian Empire”. Died “March 14, 1969” (aged 70) in “New York City, US”.
- Family of Man (verbatim from body): “Edward Steichen selected Shahn’s work, including his October 1935 photograph The family of a Resettlement Administration client in the doorway of their home, Boone County, Arkansas, for MoMA’s world-touring The Family of Man which was seen by 9 million visitors. Only the huddled figure of the woman on the right hand half of Shahn’s 35mm frame was blown up for the display.”
- Family origins (verbatim): “Shahn was born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (now Kaunas, Lithuania) to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel (Lieberman) Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir (today Ukmergė).”
- “In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States… They settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York.”
Notes
- Per
CREDIBILITY.md, Wikipedia is treated as a pointer source — the September 12, 1898 / March 14, 1969 day-month tokens are independently confirmed at Tier-2 by Encyclopædia Britannica (src-britannica-ben-shahn, fetched 2026-05-09: “Ben Shahn (born September 12, 1898, Kaunas, Russia [now in Lithuania]—died March 14, 1969, New York, New York, U.S.)”). - The 1898 / 1969 year-only resolution is independently anchored at Tier 1 by the ICP archive page (src-icp-ben-shahn-archive); the year-tokens are not in dispute.
- The “Boone County, Arkansas” plate-source identification for Shahn’s single FoM contribution (photo-0377) is recorded here at pointer status — promotion to Tier-1/2 awaits a fetch of the Library of Congress FSA/OWI online catalog record for the specific 1935 negative.
- The single-plate count in FoM is independently verified by strict-match grep against
data/photographs.csv(2026-05-09).