Board_Advisors_etc 3..5

of the United States. Known as the Attorney Gen-
eral’s List, this document adduced no evidence for
its listings and no recourse was allowed, despite
efforts by the president, W. Euguene Smith, to
ascertain the basis for the listing. Merely as a result
of being branded subversive, League members were
in danger of losing or being denied jobs or they
might have their passports withheld, making pro-
fessional travel impossible. By 1951, membership
had dropped so precipitously that the League,
unable to pay its bills, suspended operations.
The Photo League should be seen as an institu-
tion that reflected the broadly based idealism of the
New Deal during the Depression years. Begun as
an attempt to find a path to social justice through
the visual arts, its members eventually found the
means to interact with each other and with the
urban scene around them to give social photogra-
phy an ardent and compassionate life of its own.
Although its work was obscured for many years, it
is now recognized as having established a serious
culture of photography well before this approach
became widespread among galleries and museums.

NaomiRosenblum

Seealso:Abbott, Berenice; Adams, Ansel; Atget,
Euge`ne; Bernhard, Ruth; Cartier-Bresson, Henri;
Farm Security Administration; Grossman, Sid;

Hine, Lewis; History of Photography: Interwar

Years; Liebling, Jerome; Moholy-Nagy, La ́szlo ́;

Museum of Modern Art; Newhall, Beaumont; Pic-

torialism; Professional Organizations; Propaganda;

Siskind, Aaron; Social Representation; Strand,

Paul; Street Photography; Weston, Edward; Works

Progress Administration

Further Reading

Bezner, Lili Corbus.Photography and Politics in America:

From the New Deal into the Cold War. Baltimore and

London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Gerin-Lajoie, Denyse, ed. ‘‘Special Issue on the Photo Lea-

gue.’’OVO(Montreal) 10, nos. 40/41 (1981).

Lyons, Nathan, ed.Photo Notes, February 1930–Spring

1950; Filmfront, December 1934–March 1935. Rochester,

New York: Visual Studies Workshop, 1977.

Osman, Colin, ed. ‘‘Special Issue on the Photo League.’’

Creative Camera(London) nos. 223–224 (July/August

1983).

Rosenblum, Naomi.La Photo League. Exhibition catalogue

in Spanish. Madrid: Fundacio ́n Telefonica, 1999.

Tucker, Anne Wilkes. ‘‘A History of the Photo League: The

Members Speak.’’History of Photography(London) 18,

no. 2 (Summer 1994): 174–185.

Tucker, Anne Wilkes, Claire Cass, and Stephen Daiter.This

Was the Photo League: Compassion and the Camera from

the Depression to the Cold War. Exhibition catalogue.

Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago; John Cleary Gallery,

Houston, 2001.

PHOTO-SECESSION

An organization of pictorialist photographers in
the United States, the Photo-Secession was foun-
ded in 1902 by Alfred Stieglitz of New York for the
purpose of advancing the cause of photography by
achieving its recognition as a fine art. Among its
most prominent members were Stieglitz, Edward
Steichen, Gertrude Ka ̈sebier, Clarence H. White,
Joseph T. Keiley, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Frank
Eugene, and Annie W. Brigman. The group cam-
paigned to achieve its goals through the exhibition
of its members’ work in invitational salons, in its
own gallery space, and through the publication of
its journalCamera Work. This essay will examine
the Photo-Secession’s origins, its principles and

goals, its exhibition activities, and the publication

ofCamera Work.

Origins of the Photo-Secession

The Photo-Secession was but one of a number of

photographic societies that may have shared the

same goal, but for Stieglitz and its other members

the Photo-Secession was a public protest, an act of

rebellion and separation from the other existing

organizations within the amateur photographic

community. The Photo-Secession was at once a

statement of beliefs, the pronouncement of a goal,

and perhaps an unspoken claim for preeminence

PHOTO-SECESSION