Photo League

Photo League, organization of New York City photographers devoted to documenting life in the city’s working-class neighbourhoods.

The Photo League grew out of the Film and Photo League, a left-leaning organization started in the early 1930s whose goal was to document the class struggles in the United States. In 1936 the photographers split from the filmmakers fueled by more broadly social concerns, but they retained the aim of producing visual images of working-class life. The league established an advisory board that included noted photographers Berenice Abbott and Paul Strand and maintained a school directed by Sid Grossman and darkrooms for the use of members. Over time the Photo League occupied space in several different buildings, always maintaining an exhibition gallery for the display of avant-garde as well as documentary photographs and presenting lectures by well-known photographers on a variety of topics. Photo Notes, the league publication, kept members informed about events and published articles on critical issues in photography. At its strongest, the organization had about 250 members.

Before World War II, Photo League members often formed Feature Groups to document life in poor neighbourhoods. One group, headed by Aaron Siskind and including Morris Engel and Jack Manning, produced a group of photographs entitled the “Harlem Document”; another, under the leadership of Consuelo Kanaga, documented the poorer reaches of Park Avenue. Lewis W. Hine headed a group who photographed men at work; Hine himself made memorable images of men working on the construction of the Empire State Building. Arthur Leipzig and Sol Lipsohn worked in Chelsea, and Walter Rosenblum, who was president of the league for a time, photographed near his birthplace on the Lower East Side.

In the late 1940s the league’s approach became more flexible with regard to theme and treatment. Influenced by new ideas in photography and working as individuals, its members turned their lenses on instances of grace, pain, and tenderness, rather than on social inequities. The U.S. attorney general in 1947 listed the league as a subversive organization. Despite protests from several of its members who were well-known photographers, including Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith, and Edward Weston, it was forced out of existence in 1951.