Further Reading
Graham, Paul.A1-The Great North Road. London: Grey
Editions, 1983.
Graham, Paul.Beyond Caring. London: Grey Editions, 1986.
Graham, Paul.Troubled Land. London: Grey Editions 1987.
Graham, Paul.In Umbra Res. Bradford: National Museum
of Photography, Film & Television, and Manchester:
Cornerhouse Publications, 1990.
Graham, Paul.New Europe. Winterthur: Fotomuseum and
Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications, 1993.
Graham, Paul.God in Hell. London: Grey Editions, 1993.
Graham, Paul.Empty Heaven. Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum
and Zurich: Scalo Books, 1995.
Graham, Paul.Paul Graham. London: Phaidon Press, 1996.
Graham, Paul.End of an Age. Zurich: Scalo Books, 1999.
Graham, Paul.Paintings. London: Anthony Reynolds Gal-
lery; Zurich: Galerie Bob van Orsouw and New York:
Lawrence Rubin/Greenberg Van Doren, 2000.SID GROSSMAN
American
Sid Grossman stated that ‘‘the function of the
photographer is to help people understand the
world around them.’’ As a dedicated social docu-
mentary photographer, he created images with an
uncompromising concern for the human condition.
Even though he printed imaginative and expressive
works expanding the medium’s limits during his
career, since his death he has been shrouded in con-
troversy and obscurity, a victim of the McCarthy
era and changes in photographic tastes.
Grossman was a key personality in The Photo
League, an influential organization for professional
and amateur photographers in New York City. A
founding member, Grossman was also a teacher
and Director for the League’s school from 1938 to
- His legacy includes hundreds of inspired stu-
dents (Dan Weiner, Walter Rosenblum, Arthur
Leipzig, Lisette Model, Leon Levinstein, among
many others) who passed through his progressive
classes, both in New York and, later, at his Prov-
incetown School of Photography. Grossman also
mingled with other photographers at the League,
including Paul Strand, Dorothea Lange, Berenice
Abbott, Weegee, and Ansel Adams. Strongly influ-
enced by the Depression-era Farm Security Admin-
istration photographers and the documentary hero
Lewis Hine, Grossman believed photography
should serve a social purpose. Most of his street
scenes show working-class Americans and the dis-
enfranchised enduring and surviving hard times.
Like many Photo League photographers, Gross-
man photographed the underprivileged America he
knew from his own childhood. His parents were
Jewish immigrants living in the Lower East Side;
after his father deserted the family, his mother sup-
ported four children as a cook. Grossman attended
high school in the Bronx, took classes at the City
College of New York, and joined the Film and
Photo League. The following year, in 1936, he helped
found the new splinter group, The Photo League.
Largely self-taught, Grossman concentrated on free-
lance documentary work while also employed by the
Works Progress Administration (WPA) as an out-
door manual laborer. Grossman’s first photographic
project for the League began in 1938, when he colla-
borated with Sol Libsohn on theChelsea Document.
Many League members worked in activist groups,
photographing economically disadvantaged neigh-
borhoods throughout Manhattan in an effort to
visualize and understand an area’s problems, solu-
tions, and overall character. Grossman participated
in many other projects, both in and out of the Lea-
gue; in 1939, he createdNegroes in New York,a
Federal Art Project/WPA assignment. As a freelance
photographer over the years, he also infrequently
earned commercial assignments from various maga-
zines and businesses, such asFortune, Esquire, Made-
moiselle, and Lord and Taylor.
By the late 1940s, Grossman began experimenting
boldly with smaller cameras and pushed beyond the
clear, focused ‘‘realism’’ of traditional documentary
by combining people-oriented content with the dar-
ing use of angles, surfaces, and light. He increasingly
allowed his camera to blur truncated figures in dra-
matic motion and tilted planes. The grit and grain of
these prints enhanced the images’ mood, blended his
documentary philosophy with a more modernist
snapshot aesthetic, and expanded definitions of doc-GRAHAM, PAUL