Spectators at Sideshow, County Fair, Central Ohio (Summer 1938)

The Ohio harvest assignment

By 1938 Shahn was back on Roy Stryker's payroll at the Farm Security Administration. The Cleveland Museum of Art, which owns prints from the trip, notes that in July and August 1938 the agency commissioned him to cover the harvest in central Ohio, and calls the result "an invaluable in-depth portrait of rural and small town life in 1930s Ohio."

Shahn later described the assignment as vague, simply to do the harvests, and said he worked day and night on it for about six weeks. The prosperous farm country was a challenge after the South and the coalfields: "It was neat and clean and orderly and I didn't think it had any photographic qualities for me." So he looked for other ways in. He told Doud that he wanted to know what people did on Sundays, photographed church activities and an auction, and "went out to a place called Buckeye Lake," an amusement park. The county fair pictures belong to the same interest in how farm families spent their time off.

The crowd under the tent

The frame that leads this page, captioned "Spectators at sideshow, county fair, central Ohio," is one of Shahn's most unusual compositions. A row of people stands on a raised plank in front of a sideshow tent, but the scalloped edge of the canvas awning cuts them off at the shoulders, so that only their shirts, belts, trousers, overalls and shoes are visible. A rope and pole run down the left side. Whatever they are looking at stays hidden, and so do their faces.

The effect is both comic and anonymous: a crowd reduced to a pattern of checked shirts and work clothes. It is also an example of how Shahn worked in 1938, close in, catching people absorbed in something else. A second negative carries the same caption, and the archive holds several untitled frames the Library of Congress lists as possibly related.

Banners, barkers and ticket sellers

Other frames show the business side of the sideshow. In "Selling tickets to the sideshow," a young man sits at a ticket stand painted "No 2 Coney Island," holding something small up between his fingers, while a woman in a fringed and beaded dress stands behind him on the platform. A banner behind them advertises strange people and sensational acts, and children crowd the foreground. In another frame captioned "Sideshow, county fair, central Ohio," a painted banner promises "Mimi the Hippopotamus Girl," alive, walking and talking, beside a ticket booth, with a sign marked "Ladies" nailed to a tree.

What to look for: the lettering. Across the fair series Shahn photographed signs, banners and painted stands again and again, and their words often do as much work in the picture as the people.

Dates, places and related series

The Library of Congress dates most of the sideshow negatives to August 1938 but gives "1938 Summer" for the ticket-selling frame. Some other fair captions from this trip name the Champaign County Fair, but the sideshow captions say only "central Ohio," so this page does not name the county. The archive also holds a separate set Shahn made of sideshows at the Fourth of July celebration in Ashville, Ohio, which is a different event.

Shahn said many paintings came out of his documentary photographs over the years, but no source consulted for this page ties a specific painting to the sideshow frames, so none is claimed here.

The fair was only one stop on the trip. The archive holds many other frames from the same six weeks, among them main streets and stores in Plain City, people leaving church at Linworth, street scenes in Circleville and London, and a long series on the Buckeye Lake amusement park near Columbus, whose captions refer to a separate general caption. Together they reflect Shahn's stated wish to see what people did on Sundays and how they amused themselves.

Which photographs this archive holds

This is a series page. Its main image is the Library of Congress negative LC-USF33-006705-M2 (digital file LC-DIG-fsa-8a19053), "Spectators at sideshow, county fair, central Ohio." The archive also holds the second captioned spectators frame, the ticket-selling frame (LC-USF33-006707-M1) and its related frames, "Sideshow attraction," the three negatives captioned "Sideshow, county fair, central Ohio" (among them LC-USF33-006668-M3, with the Mimi banner), and the untitled frames the Library associates with them. The main frame, the ticket-selling frame and the Mimi frame are filed in LOT 1013 of the FSA/OWI Collection.