Photo League - 2001
The Photo League was a community of photographers devoted to giving visible form to the social environment of the New York City working class. It accomplished this by coupling the practice of street photography with the goals of social documentation. Depicting the social environment - how and where people live, play and work - had attracted photographers since the medium’Äôs discovery, but in photography’Äôs early years, capturing such scenes presented problems. The new hand-held cameras and the less cumbersome methods of processing that became available in the late nineteenth century enabled amateurs and professionals to photograph casually in the street. The ability to capture the chance interactions of people and structures as they occur in public places in urban settings became even more attractive after the Leica camera was marketed in the mid-1920s. Street photography flourished in Europe in the period between the two World Wars, promoted by several factors. Individuals forced by economic and political turmoil to move from city to city in search of employment and refuge seized upon the camera to arrest time and create a sense of order in a disorderly world. Such images also filled the need on the part of the expanding picture press for unposed images of chance occurrences.
The desire to capture the flux of urban life spread to the United States in the 1930s, where it sometimes blended with the social documentary projects undertaken by government and private entities.
Social documentation shares some of the characteristics of street photography, except that its purpose was and is reformative. Emerging in England and the United States towards the end of the nineteenth century, this genre had as its goal the revelation of social inequity or injustice. It was hoped that the images, reproduced mainly in print media, would arouse a sympathetic response that in turn would lead to improvement in conditions. The exhaustive photographic documentation of the depressed agricultural situation in the United States undertaken by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the 1930s probably is the best known example of this kind of purposeful camera work. Photographers working on documentary projects often captured the random quality of street life, while the social scenes revealed in chance photographs can be said to constitute a documentation of particular aspects of human communion.
The Photo League was a unique organization because its members sought to define a specific connection between social documentation and casual street photography and to elevate the resulting genre to the status of art. Composed of both amateurs and professionals, the New York branch of the League had evolved from The National Film and Photo League, set up in 1931 under the aegis of Workers International Relief. Such groups existed in the major cities of Europe and in the United States in Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco as well as New York. They were intended to supply the radical left press - notably the Daily Worker and Labor Defender - with still and motion picture images of working class struggles, taken from the point of view of those involved.
In 1936, the still photographers in the New York group separated from the film group (some of who already had left to found the film group Nykino) and formed the Photo League. Now less rigidly constrained to portray only the class struggle, these photographers nevertheless remained focused on recording "a true image of the world" from a working-class perspective. The League established an advisory board, which over the years included the well-known photographers Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, and Paul Strand, and maintained a roster of officers, none paid. Over the years, it occupied a series of rented spaces in New York City into which members built darkrooms, office space and exhibition galleries.
The exhibitions were not limited to only socially relevant imagery. At a time when there were few venues in New York besides the Museum of Modern Art that regularly showed photographs, the League mounted an unusually broad range of exhibits. Montages by John Heartfield, photograms by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and landscapes by Edward Weston, to name only three, were among the more than fifty exceptional shows held at the League galleries over the years; others organized by the League were mounted in libraries and community centers. Discussions and lectures covered a similarly broad spectrum, with, for example, Ansel Adams discussing the aesthetics of social documentation, Lotte Jacobi talking about portraiture and lighting, and Barbara Morgan lecturing on "Photo-Montage in the Modern World." PhotoNotes, the League publication, kept members informed of day-to-day events and also carried serious writing on issues in contemporary photography. Weston (who received it at his home in California), claimed it to be the "best photographic magazine of its time". The League school, which for most of its existence was under the leadership of Sid Grossman, was unusual in its emphasis on social documentation, but classes in beginning and advanced technique also were offered - all for a nominal fee. Workshops, in which students undertook special projects, were at times taught by well-known photographers such as Strand.
During the early period of the League’Äôs activities, photographic culture in the United States presented a confusing picture due to changes in attitudes about appropriate styles and themes in camera art. Towards the end of the nineteenth century much artistic photography had been made under the banner of Pictorialism, an approach that sought to mimic the themes and treatments of the hand-made arts. This direction was promoted and refined by Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession in the early 1900s in order to elevate photography to the status of art. It continued its appeal through the 1930s, in particular among amateurs in the photographic community who competed for honors in regional and national salons organized by Pictorial Photographers of America.
Fresh directions more appropriate to the post-war era and its worship of machinery and mechanization emerged in the 1920s. For members of the Photo League this style, which entailed clear, sharply defined images and prints with long tonal range, also seemed more relevant to the expression of the realities of the social milieu. Furthermore, this approach to camera expression had been adopted by the foremost photographers of the time, notably Abbott, Ansel Adams, Strand and Weston - all associated at one time or another with the Photo League, although not all involved with social documentation.
Initially, the League’Äôs main focus was on portraying those living in the various working-class neighborhoods in Manhattan. To achieve its goals, it set up Feature Groups (also referred to as Documentary Groups) consisting of members whose purpose was to return over time to the same neighborhood and document activities. In following this path, members were paying tribute to Lewis W. Hine, considered by many the exemplar of social documentation. Introduced to the Photo League in 1938 by Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, Hine’Äôs career as a self-proclaimed "social photographer" had begun early in the 1900s with an extensive documentation of tenement and child labor. After his death in 1940, the gift to the League of his negatives led to the establishment of a committee to conserve and reprint his work.
Photo League members also were inspired by the major documentary projects underway in the United States in the mid-1930s. Abbott (working with McCausland) had been able to persuade a federally funded relief agency known as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to underwrite a photographic documentation of New York City that recorded the transformation of the city through the existence of new and old structures. Images from this project, known as Changing New York, were exhibited at the Photo League, at other venues in the city, and published in book form. Selections from an even more extensive documentation of conditions in the depressed agricultural regions of the country, undertaken by a group of eight photographers working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), shown on several occasions in the League gallery, confirmed members in their belief in the efficacy of social documentation.
The goal of the Feature Groups was to create sympathetic in-depth documentations of the way people lived and interacted. One such project, ’ÄúNeighborhoods of New York,’Äù was under the direction of Consuelo Kanaga, a West Coast photographer who had come east to pursue a career in photojournalism. For another project called ’ÄúThe Harlem Document,’Äù a contingent, consisting of Lucy Ashjean, Harold Corsini, Morris Engel, Jack Manning, and Aaron Siskind returned again and again to Harlem, the center of urban black life in the East. By sympathetically depicting the lives of ordinary black New Yorkers, both projects aimed to counter the racism that was a virulent aspect of American culture at the time. The "Chelsea Document" - the work of Sid Grossman and Sol Libsohn - depicted the family activities of the mainly Irish dock workers who lived in the run-down tenement buildings of the area. Walter Rosenblum chose "Pitt Street", the neighborhood of his youth, as his area of documentation. In all these districts the small cramped apartments in tenement buildings were so inhospitable that much adult social intercourse and most children’Äôs games took place on the public thoroughfares. The street was the place for play, for arguments about politics, for sunning oneself, attending to infants' needs, for flirting or just dreaming and the photographers were there to record such moments.
Despite the absence of many of its male members in the Armed Forces throughout the more than three years of World War II, the League continued to maintain a headquarters, run a school, and publish PhotoNotes. With the return of service personnel in the post-war period, its activities expanded greatly and its approach underwent revision. Photographers were less likely to work on communal documentary projects and more involved with following their individual preferences regarding subject matter. Greater emphasis was placed on the aesthetic concepts underlying social documentation, especially in the Special Projects workshops taught by Strand.
League members had always conceived of social documentation as essentially humanist in orientation, but as time passed, this perspective became even more firmly held. In the years just before the United States became involved in World War II, this outlook can be best understood as fitting in with the ideology of the Popular Front, which sought to play down sectarian differences in the common interest. After the divisiveness of the war, the desire to find a common bond of humanity among people of different backgrounds became of paramount concern. Committed, still, to exposing social inequities, League photographers were nevertheless more engaged by individual instances of grace, pain, or tenderness than by the need to catalog social ills. They were inspired, still, by Grossman’Äôs injunction that photographs must convey a vivid sense of life, but the emphasis now was on capturing human expression and gesture.
By the late 1940s, the League’Äôs approach to social documentation had become almost indistinguishable from street photography. Many of the images produced in the workshops and Special Projects classes reveal the randomness and chance character of social life in much the same way as the work of photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson or Helen Levitt. Like Cartier-Bresson (whose work was exhibited at the League), members photographing in the various neighborhoods were on the lookout for configurations of form and light that would produce images charged with emotion and meaning. As a result of this greater flexibility of purpose, membership in the League expanded. Photographers with established reputations, among them FSA participants Jack Delano, Ed and Louise Rosskam, and John Vachon, and Life photographer W. Eugene Smith, joined, making it the prime non-commercial photography organization of its time. New headquarters were found and reconstructed to accommodate larger exhibitions and membership gatherings.
Ironically, this expansion took place during a period of political reaction in the United States.
Following the victory of the Allied forces against Nazism and Japanese militarism, distrust of the aims and goals of the Soviet Union became steadily more vocal. It was expressed in virulent anticommunist rhetoric, which spread to deny any suggestion that individuals with divergent political ideologies might peacefully co-exist within the same organization. Since 1936, the League had been open to people of various political persuasions, communists among them, demanding only that they be interested in photography. This liberality, as well as its origin in the radical Film and Photo League, made it a well-situated target for reactionary forces of the time. In 1947, it was among the several hundred organizations listed as subversive by a special board appointed by the President of the United States, and henceforth known as the Attorney General’Äôs list. Evidences of subversion, if any, were withheld from League officers, from members, and from the general public and no recourse to the listing was possible.
Support poured in from well-regarded photographers, but the Photo League found itself increasingly involved in the political unrest that affected a wide range of cultural activities in the United States at the time. Members lost or were denied jobs and had their passports withheld, making professional travel impossible. By 1951 membership had decreased to a point where the organization no longer could pay its bills and so had to suspend operations.
In the same period, the humanist approach that had been the hallmark of the League’Äôs approach was being supplanted by a quite different sensibility. The deprivations of the war years, the illiberal political climate, the threat of atomic annihilation all combined to promote avid consumerism and instill conventional social attitudes.
Chauvinism and racism remained prominent aspects of American economic and cultural life, with little acknowledgement that the war had altered the expectations of both women and blacks. The discrepancy between actuality and what American middle-class believed to be the proper patterns of public and private behavior was recognized by a number of younger artists and photographers. Their responses reflected an ironic and alienated consciousness that contrasted sharply with the idealistic humanism of the preceding generation.
The demise of the Photo League was the direct consequence of a reactionary political climate, but it was a reflection also of the transformation in sensibility taking place in the American cultural scene. The Photo League can be seen as a notable - and noble - historical phenomenon. As a community of photographers, members shared a belief in the possibility of achieving social justice through humanist photographic expression. This idealistic concept also may have relevance for today, as young people seek to fill the emptiness created by avid consumerism and post-modern cynicism with a more ardent and compassionate view of life.