The Photo League was one of the first photography cooperatives and a genuine pioneer in the history of photography. Following an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, the Howard Greenberg Gallery revisits the dreams of social justice that the League imagined through the image.
The majority of these photographers were children of the Great Depression. In 1936, when the Photo League was founded by Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott, Sol Libsohn, Sid Grossman and Walter Rosenblum, to become a member was to become both a student and practitioner of a budding style of photography—that is, street photography, leaving the studio behind to document for the world’s eyes the reality of suffering. Led by their resolutely humanist convictions, the hundred or so photographers who joined the cooperative until 1951 forged a new kind of image-based activism for social justice. It’s a brand of activism that the Howard Greenberg Gallery is bringing back into fashion.
At the time, photography was not yet considered an art form. It wasn’t considered really anything at all. That didn’t prevent W. Eugene Smith, Jack Manning, Arthur Leipzig and Edward Schwarz, to name but a few, from joining up. Together in teams, they roamed the mean streets of New York to document the conditions of the city’s inhabitants, always imagining that each shutter click could be a powerful weapon in their fight. A shoe-shine boy stopped them in their tracks, then a miner, then to the crowded beaches of Coney Island. In Harlem, they documented the daily struggles of the black community. Due south, Walter Rosenblum wandered the Lower East Side, where he immortalized rough-and-tumble Pitt Street. Their photographs told their own stories as much as their subjects’. They developed their film in the Photo League’s offices, then published them in the newspaper or in Photo Notes, an in-house newsletter. Of all the members, Paul Strand was the mentor figure. A new generation of street photographers was born.
The exhibition, entitled simply “The Photo League,” presents a selection of the photos from this period. In their unity of humor and rugged beauty, they each bear the visual signature of the League. In 1947, the Photo League, already suspected of Communist sympathies, was officially declared subversive and blacklisted by the FBI. The collective had been Marxist since its Berlin origins, but there remained very few links to the Communist party. Somewhat ironically, the declaration came right when the League was converting itself into the more ecumenical Center for American Photography. In 1951, the Photo League was finally forced to disband, and its members went their separate ways. A few of its most ardent believers, like Sid Grossman, would never recover from its loss. But they would serve as an example for all that the news is not something that happens to other people, on the other side of the world.
Jonas Cuénin
