Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936–1951 at The Jewish Museum, New York

Weegee, Max Is Rushing in the Bagels

Most of the members of the New York Photo League, founded in 1936, were Jewish—first-generation Americans who came of age during the Depression. As an ambitious exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York (on view through March 12) suggests, the League’s members were thus especially well placed to document the daily lives and struggles of the city’s immigrants, and its street life, tenements, and child laborers. As League photographer Walter Rosenblum is quoted as saying in the exhibition catalogue, “We feel deeply about the people we photograph, because our subject matter is our own flesh and blood. The kids are our own images when we were young.” Fired by a faith in the power of a progressive alliance between socialism and art and inspired by the imagery of a previous generation of documentary photographers like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, the League’s members sought to expose a range of urban social injustices. There are pictures here by the League’s most distinguished figures and mentors, people like Sid Grossman, Hine, Berenice Abbott, and Weegee, as well as by the hundreds of photographers who comprised its rank-and-file, for whom an objective detachment was deemed neither feasible nor desirable. Many of the early photographs are striking for their almost visceral representation of a brutal urban poverty.

But the early work of the League was not strictly documentary. Grossman, one of the League’s founders, not only encouraged an interest in the subjective image, he also addressed the role of art in documentary photography and the results are evident in the work. Consider Walter Rosenblum’s Girl on a Swing (1938), for example, or Sidney Kerner’s Pitt Street, New York (1938), in which a stickball game is photographed from above, the shadows of the surrounding tenements framing the scene. And for New Yorkers of a certain age there are boundless opportunities here for nostalgia—in Abbott’s depiction of the late-lamented Zito’s Bakery (1937) and in Weegee’s Max is Rushing the Bagels to a Restaurant on Second Avenue for the Morning Trade (ca. 1940), among many others.

In 1947 the League was blacklisted and by 1951 was forced to shut down altogether. As Aaron Siskind (evidently a regular Woody Allen) observed at one point: “I was a natural for a Communist because I was Jewish. I looked like a Jew and I lived in New York.” The work of the organization was distinguished not exclusively by its efforts to effect social change through documentary photography. At least as significant was the pioneering role this group of mainly first-generation Americans played in the notion that documentary photography should have a personal perspective – the shift, as Mason Klein puts it, “from bearing witness to determining one’s own bearings.” 
By Catherine Bindman

Berenice Abbott, Zito's Bakery