Photo League


The Photo League was a cooperative of photographers in New York who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. Founded in 1936, the League included some of the most noted American photographers of the mid-20th century among its members. It ceased operations in 1951 following its placement in 1947 on the U.S. Department of Justice blacklist with accusations that it was a communist, anti-American organization.

Origins

The League's origins traced back to a project of the Workers International Relief, a communist association based in Berlin. In 1930 the WIR established the Workers Camera League in New York City, which soon came to be known as the Film and Photo League. Its goals were to “struggle against and expose reactionary film; to produce documentary films reflecting the lives and struggles of the American workers; and to spread and popularize the great artistic and revolutionary Soviet productions”.

Ethos

In 1934 the still photographers and the filmmakers in the League began having differences of opinion over social and production interests, and by 1936 they had formed separate groups. Paul Strand and Ralph Steiner established Frontier Films, to continue promoting the original goals, while Strand and Berenice Abbott renamed the original group “The Photo League”. The two organizations remained friendly, with members of each group often participating in activities of the other. The goal of the newly reformed Photo League was to “put the camera back into the hands of honest photographers who... use it to photograph America”.
The League quickly became active in the new field of socially conscious photography. Unlike other photography organizations, it did not espouse a particular visual style but instead concentrated on “integrating formal elements of design and visual aesthetics with the powerful and sympathetic evidence of the human condition”. It also offered basic and advanced classes in photography when there were few such courses in colleges or trade schools. A newsletter, Photo Notes, was printed irregularly, depending upon who was available to do the work and if they could afford the printing costs. More than anything else, though, the League was a gathering place for photographers to share and experience their common artistic and social interests.

Influential members

Among the members of the League were co-founders Sol Libsohn and Sid Grossman ; Morris Engel ; Arthur Leipzig ; Ruth Orkin, Jerome Liebling, and Lester Talkington ; Walter Rosenblum ; Eliot Elisofon ; Aaron Siskind; Jack Manning ; Dan Weiner; Bill Witt; Martin Elkort; Lou Bernstein; Sy Kattelson; Louis Stettner; and Lisette Model.

Women photographers

Unusually for artist groups at the time, about one third of League members and participants were women and they served in visible leadership roles such as secretary, treasurer, vice president, and president. For example, Lucy Ashjian, who joined the League as early as 1936, was Photo Notes editor and board chair of the League's school. Sonia Handelman Meyer was both photographer and secretary, the league's only paid position.
In the early 1940s the list of notable photographers who were active in the League or supported their activities also included Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, Helen Levitt, FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein, Beaumont Newhall, Nancy Newhall, Richard Avedon, Weegee, Robert Frank, Harold Feinstein, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Minor White. The League was the caretaker of the Lewis Hine Memorial Collection, which Hine's son had given the League in recognition of its role in fostering social activism through photography as his father had done.

Blacklisting

Many of the members who joined before the end of World War II were first-generation Americans who strongly believed in progressive political and social causes. Few were aware of the political origins of the movement of the communist "Workers as Photographers" in Berlin. This had in fact little to do with what the organization did as it evolved, but helped its downfall after the war, when it was accused by the FBI of being communist, subversive and anti-American.
In December 1947, the Photo League was formally declared a subversive and placed on a U.S. Department of Justice blacklist of subversive organizations by Attorney General Tom C. Clark. Following this announcement, the Photo League appeared on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations published on March 20, 1948, in the Federal Register.
At first the League fought back and mounted an impressive This Is the Photo League exhibition in 1948, but after its member and long-time FBI informer Angela Calomiris had testified in May 1949 that the League was a front organization for the Communist Party, the Photo League was finished. Recruitment dried up and old members left, including one of its founders and former president, Paul Strand, as well as Louis Stettner. The League disbanded in 1951.
After the League's demise, and with the return of more women to domestic roles in the postwar era, the careers of many promising women artists, such as Sonia Handelman Meyer and Rae Russel, did not continue.

Legacy

The Photo League was the subject of a 2012 documentary film: Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League's New York by Daniel Allentuck and Nina Rosenblum. The film traces the rise and demise of the Photo League between 1936 and 1951, and includes interviews with surviving members and a soundtrack including Woody Guthrie, the Andrews Sisters, and the Mills Brothers. Cineaste Magazine calls the film a "fine addition to the library of documentaries dedicated to remembering the cultural work of the old left."

Members of the Photo League