The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League

3 minute read

A game of hopscotch. A toothpaste ad. Filthy slums. This, for better or worse, was New York life in the 1930s. Many looked but few saw until the Photo League—a pioneering group of young, idealistic documentary photographers—captured that life with cameras.

The Manhattan-based League, which incorporated a school, darkroom, gallery and salon, was the first institution of its kind when it was founded in 1936 says Mason Klein, curator of fine arts at The Jewish Museum, which is currently presenting “The Radical Camera,” an exhibition in collaboration with the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. “There was nothing like the Photo League, where people could exhibit their work, students alongside their mentors, be taught a kind of history of photography and start understanding what the meaning of the photograph might be.”

Many of its founding members, including Sid Grossman, Sol Libsohn and Aaron Siskind, were first-generation Jewish immigrants with progressive, left-wing sensibilities. “They were very conscious of neighborhoods and communities,” says Klein. “I think it was very natural for Jews to form an egalitarian group and understand that the ordinary citizen of the urban scene was as much a valid subject as any for photography.”

The League thrived for fifteen years, generating projects like the Harlem Document, a collaborative effort by ten photographers to document the living conditions in poor black neighborhoods. It also fostered the careers of notable photographers such as Lisette Model, Weegee and Rosalie Gwathmey.

Despite its progressive agenda, the League’s mission was far from simplistic. Founder Grossman, who was just 23 when the group started, encouraged its members to look beyond documentary and question their relationship with the image. “Sid taught people to challenge their habitual ways of seeing the world,” says Klein. “A more poetic and metaphoric expression of how one saw the world was what Sid wanted from his students.” Under Grossman’s guidance, the League’s young muckrakers became artists.

By the 1940s, the League had turned away from its narrow political focus, capturing the squalor and splendor of everyday New York. The country was moving in the other direction, however, zeroing in on those suspected of harboring leftist sympathies. On December 5, 1947, the U.S. Attorney General blacklisted the League as “totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive.” In 1951, it closed its doors forever.

The League’s reputation has never truly recovered, says Klein. “They were condemned to a kind of ideological shelving and, I think, unfairly treated by history. We’re trying to rectify that with this show, because they really were always about pushing the photograph and understanding it as art.”

The Radical Camera is on display at The Jewish Museum in New York through March 25.

Untitled (Brooklyn Bridge), 1938Alexander Alland © Estate of Alexander Alland, Sr.
Chalk Games, Prospect Place, Brooklyn, 1950Arthur Leipzig © Arthur Leipzig
Untitled (Subway Car)Sy Kattelson © Sy Kattleson
Slums Must Go! May Day Parade, New York, 1936Joe Schwartz © Joe Schwartz
Untitled (Iodent Toothpaste Ads), 1937Eliot Elisofon
Times Square, from Astor Hotel, 1950 Ruth Orkin © Estate of Ruth Orkin
Lower East Side, 1940Lisette Model © The Lisette Model Foundation, Inc.
Max Is Rushing in the Bagels to a Restaurant on Second Avenue for the Morning Trade, 1940Weegee © Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images
In the Shadow of the Capitol, 1948Marion Palfi © 1998 Arizonia Board of Regents, Center for Creative Photography
Halloween, South Side, 1951Marvin E. Newman © Marvin E. Newman
Ideal Laundry, 1946Arthur Leipzig © Arthur Leipzig
Spaghetti 25 Cents, New York, 1945Ida Wyman © Ida Wyman
Zito's Bakery, 259 Bleecker Street, 1937Berenice Abbott
Untitled (Tenements, New York) , 1937Consuelo Kanaga
Playing Football, 1939Harold Corsini © Estate of Harold Corsini
Boy Jumping into Hudson River, 1948Ruth Orkin © Estate of Ruth Orkin
Coming to America, 1951Louis Stettner © Louis Stettner, Courtesy Bonni Benrubi Gallery
Butterfly Boy, New York, 1949Jerome Liebling © Estate of Jerome Liebling

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