Photo League
Encyclopedia
The Photo League was a cooperative of amateur and professional photographers in New York who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. The League was active from 1936 to 1951 and included among its members some of the most noted American photographers of the mid-20th century.
History
The League’s origins can be traced back to a project of the Workers International Relief (WIR), which was a communist association based in Berlin. In 1930 the WIR established the Worker’s Camera LeagueWorkers Film and Photo League
The Workers Film and Photo League was an organization of filmmakers in the United States initially affiliated with the Workers International Relief...
in New York City, which soon came to be known as the Film and Photo League. The propaganda goals of the Film and Photo League were to “struggle against and expose reactionary film; to produce documentary films reflecting the lives and struggles of the American workers; and to spread and popularize the great artistic and revolutionary Soviet productions.”
In 1934 the still photographers and the filmmakers in the League began having differences of opinion over social and production interests, and by 1936 they had formed separate groups. Paul Strand
Paul Strand
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century...
and Ralph Steiner
Ralph Steiner
Ralph Steiner was an American photographer, pioneer documentarian and a key figure among avant-garde filmmakers in the 1930s.-Biography:...
established Frontier Films, to continue promoting the original goals, while at the same time Strand and Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott , born Bernice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s.-Youth:...
renamed the original group to simply “The Photo League”. The two organizations remained friendly, with members from one group often participating in activities of the other. The goal of the newly reformed Photo League was to “put the camera back into the hands of honest photographers who (...) use it to photograph America.” It also offered basic and advanced classes in photography at a time when there were no such courses in colleges or trade schools. A newsletter, called Photo Notes, was printed on a somewhat random schedule depending upon who was available to do the work and if they the could afford the printing costs. More than anything else, though, the League was a gathering place for photographers to share and experience their common artistic and social interests.
Among its members were co-founders Sol Libsohn
Sol Libsohn
Sol Libsohn was a self-taught photographer who originally earned his living documenting paintings. He co-founded the Photo League with Sid Grossman. Libsohn was an important teacher at the League as well as a member and leader of numerous production groups...
and Sid Grossman
Sid Grossman
Sid Grossman was an American photographer and the co-founder with Sol Libsohn of the Photo League. Grossman played numerous roles throughout the Photo League's existence . He organized classes in documentary photography...
(director of the Photo League School), Walter Rosenblum, editor of the Photo League Photo Notes, Eliot Elisofon
Eliot Elisofon
Eliot Elisofon was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, known for his work with Life Magazine. He started working for Life Magazine in 1942 and continued until 1964. Some of his best known works are colour photo essays on Africa, the South Pacific, and other...
, a LIFE
Life
Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased , or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate...
photographer, Morris Engel
Morris Engel
Morris Engel was an influential American photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker best known for directing the 1953 film The Little Fugitive in collaboration with his wife, photographer Ruth Orkin, and their friend, writer Raymond Abrashkin.Engel completed two more features during the 1950s,...
(since 1936), Jerome Liebling
Jerome Liebling
Jerome Liebling was an American photographer, filmmaker, and teacher.He studied photography under Walter Rosenblum and Paul Strand, and joined New York's famed Photo League...
, who joined in 1947, Aaron Siskind
Aaron Siskind
Aaron Siskind was an American abstract expressionist photographer. In his biography he wrote that he began his foray into photography when he received a camera for a wedding gift and began taking pictures on his honeymoon. He quickly realized the artistic potential this offered...
, Jack Manning
Jack Manning
Jack Manning may refer to:*Jack Manning , 19th century baseball player*Jack Manning , American film, stage and television actor-Others:...
, a member of the Harlem Document Group of the League and a New York Times photographer, Dan Weiner
Dan Weiner
Dan Weiner was an American photojournalist, working largely for Fortune magazine. Weiner specialized in photographs of America at work.-Biography:Weiner was born in New York City in 1919...
, Bill Witt, Lou Bernstein, Arthur Leipzig
Arthur Leipzig
Arthur Leipzig is an American photographer who specializes in street photography and is known for his photographs of New York City.-Career:...
(since 1942), Sy Kattelson
Sy Kattelson
Sy Kattelson is an American photographer whose earliest work documents working class New Yorkers during the years immediately following World War Two. He was an early practitioner of street photography and was associated with the Photo League from 1947 until its closing in 1951...
, Lester Talkington (from 1947) and Ruth Orkin
Ruth Orkin
Ruth Orkin was an American photographer, filmmaker and a late member of the Photo League. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Orkin married photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel....
, a member from 1947.
Other early members were Arnold S. Eagle, George Gilbert, Morris Haberland, Sidney Kerner, Richard A. Lyon, Edward Schwarz, Lou Stoumen, Sandra Weiner, born Sandra Smith.
The 1948/49 retrospective exhibition This Is the Photo League featured ninety-six photographers.
At its height in the early 1940s the list of notable photographers who were active in the League or supported their activities also included Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott , born Bernice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s.-Youth:...
, Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her...
, W. Eugene Smith
W. Eugene Smith
William Eugene Smith was an American photojournalist known for his refusal to compromise professional standards and his brutally vivid World War II photographs.- Life and work :...
, Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for "street photography" around New York City, and has been called "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time."- Biography :...
, Arthur Rothstein
Arthur Rothstein
Arthur Rothstein was an American photographer.Rothstein is recognized as one of America’s premier photojournalists. During a career that spanned five decades, he provoked, entertained and informed the American people...
, a FSA photographer, Beaumont Newhall
Beaumont Newhall
Beaumont Newhall was an influential curator, art historian, writer, and photographer. His The History of Photography remains one of the most significant accounts in the field and has become a classic photo history textbook...
, Nancy Newhall
Nancy Newhall
Nancy Wynne Newhall was an American photography critic. She is best known for writing the text to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, but was also a widely published writer on photography, conservation, and American culture.Newhall was born Nancy Wynne in Lynn, Massachusetts,...
, Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon was an American photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century."-Photography career:Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish Russian...
, Weegee
Weegee
Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig , a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography....
, Robert Frank
Robert Frank
Robert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American...
, Harold Feinstein
Harold Feinstein
Harold Feinstein is an American photographer.-Biography:Harold Feinstein was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1931. At the age of 15 he began photographing and by 19 he was considered a young prodigy in the field, having his work purchased by Edward Steichen for the permanent collection of the...
and, even though they did not live in New York, Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....
, Edward Weston
Edward Weston
Edward Henry Weston was a 20th century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of...
and Minor White
Minor White
Minor Martin White was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.White earned a degree in botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933. His first creative efforts were in poetry, as he took five years thereafter to complete a sequence of 100 sonnets while...
. The League was also active as the caretaker of the Lewis Hine
Lewis Hine
Lewis Wickes Hine was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform. His photographs were instrumental in changing the child labor laws in the United States.-Early life:...
Memorial Collection, which Hine's son had given the League in recognition of their role in fostering social activism through photography as his father had done.
Most of the members who joined before the end of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
were first-generation Americans who strongly believed in progressive political and social causes. Few were aware of the political origins of the movement of the communist "Workers as Photographers" (Arbeiterfotografen) in Berlin. This had in fact little to do with what the organization did as it evolved, but helped its downfall after the war, when it was accused by the FBI of being communist, and as such "subversive and anti-American."
In 1947 the League was formally declared subversive and placed on the U.S. Department of Justice blacklist
Blacklist
A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. As a verb, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize a person from a certain social circle...
by Attorney General Tom C. Clark
Tom C. Clark
Thomas Campbell Clark was United States Attorney General from 1945 to 1949 and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States .- Early life and career :...
. At first the League fought back and mounted an impressive This Is the Photo League exhibition in 1948), but after its member and long-time FBI informer Angela Calomiris
Angela Calomiris
Angela "Angie" Calomiris was an American photographer who became a secret FBI informant within the Communist Party USA under the name Angela Cole...
had testified in May 1949 that the League was a front organization for the Communist Party, the Photo League was finished. Recruitment dried up and old members left, including one of its founders and former president, Paul Strand, as well as Louis Stettner
Louis Stettner
Louis Stettner is an American photographer of the 20th century whose work includes streetscapes, portraits and architectural images of New York and Paris. His work has been highly regarded because of its humanity and capturing the life and reality of the people and streets of both cities...
. The League was forced to disband in 1951.