PHOTO LEAGUE
The New York City photographers who banded
together as the Photo League were dedicated to
promoting social photography. In essence, they
joined together the concept of social documentation
with the practice of street photography. Purposeful
social documentation, which had emerged as a dis-
tinct genre in the United States towards the end of
the nineteenth century, usually was meant to inform
the public about economic or social inequities in the
hope of eliciting action. Street photography, which
had become widespread only in the mid-1920s after
hand-held cameras and easier processing methods
were made accessible, was a way of capturing casual
aspects of ordinary life as it devolved in urban set-
tings. Over time, the blending of these two genres
became the defining characteristic of the camera
work done by Photo League members.
Emerging in 1936 during one of the more hopeful
years of the Great Depression, the Photo League
offered an alternative to the precepts of Pictorialism,
an earlier photographic movement that had mostly
attracted well-to-do amateurs. With its emphasis on
artistic themes and soft, indistinct treatments, this
approach to photographic art had already begun to
seem old-fashioned in the highly mechanized culture
of the 1920s; by the 1930s it seemed quite irrelevant.
A different aesthetic approach, which mandated
sharp, clear imagery and emphasis on what was
termed ‘‘the thing itself,’’ claimed the attention of
serious expressive photographers, among them
Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and
Edward Weston; all of whom would be associated
to one degree or another with the Photo League.
Also changing were the sharp divisions between the
various genres of photography. As camera expres-
sion became recognized as the most up-to-date
means of visual illustration, images of all kinds
appeared in advertisements, periodicals, and on gal-
lery walls, thereby expanding what was thought of
as photographic art.
The Photo League was initially organized in the
early 1930s as The Film and Photo League, under
the sponsorship of Workers International Relief—
a European organization with a social orientation.
This body had established such groups in Chicago
and New York as well as in major European cities
in order to supply the radical left press with visual
images of working-class life taken from the point of
view of those involved. In 1936, the still photogra-
phers in the New York group separated from the
filmmakers (some of whom became Nykino and
later Frontier Films), and changed the organiza-
tion name to the Photo League. (The Chicago
group appears to have become defunct by this
time.) Their approach to documentation became
less rigidly dedicated to portraying only the class
struggle and more open to capturing other aspects
of working class life. As a consequence, nearly all
members photographed at one time or another in
the streets of New York.
The League established an advisory board, which
included Abbott and Strand and a rostrum of offi-
cers; for many years Walter Rosenblum was presi-
dent. Over time, it rented a series of spaces in
downtown Manhattan locations where members con-
structed darkrooms, meeting rooms, and galleries.
Work by outside established photographers as well
as by members was shown, with first-time exhibitions
in the United States given by, for example, German
montagist John Heartfield and French photogra-
phers Edouard Boubat and Robert Doisneau. Other
than the Museum of Modern Art, the Photo League
gallery was the only venue in the United States where
one might see work by Euge`ne Atget, La ́szlo ́
Moholy-Nagy, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The League held semi-monthly meetings and
presented lectures on a variety of topics. Among
them was a symposium on Photographic Books, an
unusual theme in an era when comparatively few
such books were being produced. Suggestive of the
wide range of themes of interest to League mem-
bers were talks by Ralph Steiner on ‘‘Art and Doc-
umentary Photography,’’ by Ruth Bernhard on her
personal work, and by editor Tom J. Maloney on
U.S. Camera Annual. League members engaged
members of Pictorial Photographers of America
in an on-going discussion about the value of social
photography as opposed to Pictorialism.
Starting in 1937 and largely under the director-
ship of Sid Grossman, the League ran a school for
which tuition was a nominal $15 a session. Classes
in basic and advanced technique, documentary
photography, and history of photography (taught
by Grossman and Sol Libsohn among others) werePHOTO LEAGUE