They wanted to change the world, one photograph at a time.
Rosalie
Gwathmey (1908–2001, born Charlotte, North Carolina)
Shout Freedom, Charlotte, North Carolina, c. 1948 Gelatin silver print
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Photo League Collection, Museum Purchase with
funds provided by Elizabeth M. Ross, the Derby Fund, John S. and Catherine
Chapin Kobacker, and the Friends of the Photo League 7 ⅞ x 6
3/4 in.
"The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936–1951" now open at the
Contemporary Jewish Museum
(CJM) presents the contested path of the documentary photograph and the
League during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of
the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.
Arthur
Leipzig (born 1918, Brooklyn, New York)
Ideal Laundry, 1946 Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Esther Leah Ritz Bequest. 10 x 8 in.
That could have been the motto of New York’s Photo League, founded in
1936 by young Jewish-American photographers Sid Grossman and Sol
Libsohn. Young, idealistic, mostly Jewish, they believed in the
expressive power of the documentary photograph and progressive,
socialist ideas and art.
A unique complex of school, darkroom, gallery, and salon, the League
was also a place where you learned about yourself. Sid Grossman, one of
the founders, pushed students to discover not only the meaning of their
work but also their relationship to it. This transformative approach
was one of the League’s most innovative and influential contributions to
the medium.
The group eventually had over 300 members, including legends in the field such as Berenice Abbott, Weegee and Aaron Siskind.
Their work resulted in a street-level, popular history of the era,
told through documentary photographs of the marginalized. criminalized,
and dispossessed. In its early years the League was committed to the idea of
photography as honest and unmediated. A “true” and “good” picture was
one in which aesthetic qualities did not overwhelm the content or
subvert its message. The Leaguers were inspired to make inequity and
discrimination tangible in their work.
Photographs, with titles such as "Shoemaker’s Lunch" and "Salvation
Army Lassie in Front of a Woolworth Store," exposed issues of class,
poverty, racial inequality, and lack of opportunity.
Vivian
Cherry (born 1920, Manhattan, New York)
Game of Lynching, East Harlem, 1947.Gelatin silver print
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Photo League Collection, Museum Purchase, Derby
Fund 6¼ x 9
in. (15.9 x 22.9 cm)
Vivian Cherry’s disturbing images of boys playing at lunching were the
first photographs to link certain kinds of violence in children's
games with racism.
The series was published by ’48 Magazine of the Year; Photography
republished them in 1952, commenting, “The pictures are not pretty, but
they do represent an attempt to . . . use a camera as a tool for social
research.”
Sid Grossman, interviewed in the film, “Ordinary Miracles,” said that
their desire was to “get close to people as human beings, to try to
push them in a progressive direction."
The images range from the street life of the lower East side to
farming communities hard hit by the dust bowl. The sensitive and
compelling images of African-Americans were the first to document their
lives with respect. showing their humanity and strength while coping
with extreme poverty.
During its fifteen-year existence (1936–1951), the Photo League would
mirror monumental shifts in the world starting with the Depression,
through World War II, and ending with the Red Scare. Throughout those
tumultuous times, its members engaged in lively debate and ongoing
experimentation in the streets to propel
documentary photography from factual images to a more subjective, poetic reading of life.
Consuelo
Kanaga (1894–1978, born Astoria, Oregon)
Untitled (Tenements, New York), c. 1937 Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of
Virginia Stevens Gift
Presented in collaboration with another major Photo League collector,
The Jewish Museum in New York City, “Radical Camera” offers nearly 150
photographs created around and during the league’s lifespan, as well as
videos, oral histories and interactive displays.
The Cold War politics of the McCarthy era eventually destroyed the
group. Shocked and dismayed at the attacks upon the organization, they
mounted an exhibition entitled “This Is the Photo League,” which
showcased the diversity and quality of its members’ work.
The retrospective opened in December 1948 with photographs by more
than ninety past and present members. While it achieved a measure of
critical attention, the effort came too late. By now, the political
atmosphere was by now far too toxic. Membership and revenues dwindled
and the group was ostracized.
Sid Grossman, the League’s
great teacher and mentor who led passionate debates about the rolerole
of the personal and subjective in the documentary image, was
particularly victimized and disillusioned by the blacklist. He resigned
in 1949 and retreated to Provincetown, Massachusetts.
There
he continued to teach photography and to make art, but his reputation
faded. Shortly before he died in 1955, at age forty-three, he commented
with some irony on a late series of “pictures of birds” he had made in
Cape Cod. They were, he acknowledged, scarcely the kind of documentary
subject that he would have pursued earlier in life.
“Yet
this material,” he said, “was quite harmonious with my past history as a
photographer, visually and emotionally.” Grossman perhaps felt obliged
to explain that these photographs, with their allover pattern of
flickering light and agitated movement, drew upon the contemporary
language of abstract expressionism. More poignantly, the birds’ feeding
frenzy suggests the poisonous atmosphere that had finally forced him out
of the League.
In 1950, the Photo League officially closed its doors, a casualty of the Cold War.
Although
short lived, the Photo League’s influence was significant. The sense of
artistic “presentness” and the assertion of the photographer’s identity
in the work of artists such as Diane Arbus, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt,
and Robert Frank are, in many ways, the legacy of the Photo League as
was the subjective, poetic renderings of social themes that would
characterize the next generation of street photographers.
Review:
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-radical-camera-new-york-s-photo-league-1936-1951-at-the-cjm
At the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
http://www.thecjm.org/
Through January 31, 2013
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