offered as well as workshops, in which students
pursued individual projects; one such workshop
was taught by Strand.
PhotoNotes, the League publication, edited on
and off by Rosalie Gwathmey and produced at
first by mimeograph, later by multigraph, and for
its final issue by letterpress, not only kept members
informed of day-to-day events, but also carried
serious writing on critical issues in photography.
Edward Weston was quoted as regarding it ‘‘the
best photo magazine in America today.’’Photo-
Notescontinued to appear, if sporadically, through-
out the war years despite the inroads made in 1941
by the draft, which depleted the number of men
involved in League activities. Following the demise
of the League, this valuable periodical was comple-
tely forgotten until reproduced in 1977 in book
format by the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester,
New York.
Initially, to achieve its working-class focus, the
League had set up Feature Groups (sometimes
referred to as Documentary Groups). This approach
owed something to the example of Lewis Hine, the
pioneer social photographer who had documented
American working people and, late in life, had been
introduced to the League by Abbott and her associ-
ate, art historian and writer Elizabeth McCausland.
After his death in 1940, his work was given to the
League and a committee under the leadership of
Marynn Older (Ausubel) was set up to conserve
and reprint it. (Eventually, after the League ceased
to function, this collection was given to George
Eastman House in Rochester, New York).
The Feature Groups consisted of individuals,
working in concert and alone, who returned over a
period of time to specified working-class neighbor-
hoods to create in-depth portrayals of the way peo-
ple lived. One such endeavor, ‘‘Neighborhoods of
New York,’’ was under the leadership of Consuelo
Kanaga, a West Coast photographer who had come
east to work as a photojournalist. For another,
‘‘The Harlem Document,’’ a contingent consisting
of Lucy Asjean, Harold Corsini, Morris Engel, Bea-
trice Kosofsky, Jack Manning, and Aaron Siskind
returned time and again to Harlem, working in the
streets and gaining access to private apartments.
Despite the fact that there were almost no black
photographers in the League during its entire per-
iod, both projects reflected efforts by members to
counter then prevalent racist attitudes toward black
people. ‘‘The Chelsea Document,’’ the work of
Grossman and Sol Libsohn, depicted a west side
working-class neighborhood that was home to
longshoremen. Rosenblum portrayed Pitt Street,
the immigrant neighborhood of his youth, and
Dan Weiner concentrated on Yorkville. At the
time the tenement apartments in these neighbor-
hoods were so cramped that much adult social
intercourse and most children’s games took place
in the streets, greatly facilitating the photographers’
access to their subjects.
Besides the inspiration deriving from Hine’s
example, League members were acutely aware of
the documentary photography projects being
funded in the mid-1930s by federal agencies, nota-
bly the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and
the Works Progress Administration (WPA).Chan-
ging New York, a project initiated by Abbott for the
WPA, undoubtedly directed members’ attention to
the social role that organized photographic docu-
mentation might play. The FSA’s visual record of
depressed conditions in the agricultural sectors of
the United States, examples of which appeared in
news media and weekly periodicals as well as in
several large scale exhibitions, also was shown
more than once in the League gallery.
Despite the rhetoric about structured social doc-
umentation, the League’s methods of working
always were somewhat flexible and became even
more so at the end of the Second World War. By
the late 1940s when Strand gave a Special Projects
class, organized endeavors as such had disappeared,
with participants engaged more by individual in-
stances of pain and/or tenderness than by a need
to catalog social inequities. Serendipitous street doc-
umentation by Arthur Leipzig and Sandra Weiner
(each of whom studied with Strand) often revealed
random but ambiguous moments of grace, thereby
transforming social documentation into a more
broadly humanist mode of expressive street photo-
graphy. The end of the War undoubtedly brought
with it a more accepting attitude toward human
experience in general, with the result that the photo-
graphers frequently sought out exhilarating rather
than distressing moments. With greater flexibility
about theme and a more open attitude toward aes-
thetic matters in the post-war years, the League
attracted both young photographers such as Jerome
Liebling and those with established reputations,
among them Barbara Morgan, Nancy and Beau-
mont Newhall, and W. Eugene Smith.
Ironically, this expansion in activities and mem-
bership, which inspired a move to new and larger
quarters in the Hotel Albert on East 10th Street,
took place during a period of increasing anti-left
sentiment in the United States. Although the Lea-
gue considered itself a non-political entity, open to
photographers of any belief, in 1947 it became one
of several hundred organizations listed as subver-
sive by a special board approved by the PresidentPHOTO LEAGUE