Snap Judgements: New York's Photo League

by Alastair Johnston
 

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936–1951
Yale University Press, edited by Mason Klein and Catherine Evans, 248 pp., with 150 duotones and 76 B&W images.

This book and touring exhibition presents a comprehensive look at a little-known and important American art organization of the mid-twentieth century. Formed in 1936, the Photo League of New York shut down 15 years later during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era. Their parent organization, the Film & Photo League, was formed in 1930 as part of FDR's New Deal to make documentary films. A number of Leftists and Jews were prominent in their ranks. Like the WPA before them these artists had an incredible empathy for their subjects, and believed in art in the service of progressive social activism. The Photo League, led by Paul Strand, Walter Rosenblum and Sid Grossman, broke away from the parent film unit after an unresolved fight over aesthetic versus political approaches to their work. There were some 400 members over the years, and today we recognize the big names of street photography among them: Lisette Model, Weegee, W. Eugene Smith, Berenice Abbott, Lou Stoumen, Aaron Siskind, Jerome Leibling, Dan Weiner, and many others who created a new aesthetic, both in terms of the composition and printing of their work, and in the subject matter.

Lisette Model, "Lower East Side, ca. 1940"

Lewis Hine was obviously a key figure in their formation, in fact he left his archives to the Photo League (and this was the beginning of a nightmare as one unscrupulous member -- Rosenblum -- started printing Hine's negatives and added a studio stamp to the back to make them appear to be vintage prints, as a marketing scam). Hine, like Jacob Riis, pioneered documentary portraits of the grim life of "the other half." Riis was the first to use flash photography to cast light on the seedy all-night dives or hobos' lairs under bridges. Hine snuck into factories to find children tending huge dangerous machines: his work had a major impact on child labor laws in the USA. His oeuvre gave the Photo League permission not to be squeamish and to bare all in their own work. Newly introduced hand-held 35 mm cameras -- also embraced by Paul Strand -- made spontaneous street photography possible and, despite any political agenda, the members were able to incorporate poetry and self-expression into their work.

Marvin E Newman, "Halloween, South Side, 1951"

I had always loved Helen Levitt until I found out she cheated: she had a spy camera that had a mirror in it so she would be facing one way and looking in the viewfinder, as if she were photographing the street, but in reality was taking a picture at 90 degrees of people on the stoop. To me it's important to engage the subject in the photo for a successful image. However there are other, unknown, photographers in here that catch those "Levitt" moments with aplomb and, presumably, without resorting to mirrors. Marvin E Newman's "Halloween, South Side, 1951," is a classic "Levitt" shot, and one that has not been widely published. Quite a few of the Photo League photographers, such as Arthur Leipzig, were interested in children's games. Similarly the caught-on-the-fly moments of Austrian Robert Frank are foreshadowed in the cauldron of the Photo League.

In the case of the WPA photographers, their government-backed mandate was to document the migration of farmers in the Dust Bowl: for the Photo League the poor inhabitants of Harlem in their backyard became the subject of a documentary study from 1936-40.

Vivian Cherry, "Game of Lynching, East Harlem, 1947"

"Game of Lynching," a series by Vivian Cherry (a former dancer who took up photography when she was injured), shows two little white boys holding the arms of an African American youth as part of a very different game. Cherry sent the images to McCall's who rejected them saying they were a little too real for publication and they did not think their readers could empathize or identify with the protagonists. But the rise of the picture press, such as Life, Look and PM magazines, was a great forum for these artists from the Depression through the Second World War and on to the burgeoning Civil Rights struggle. To bolster their ranks the Photo League also got Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein and John Vachon, three of the great unsung heros of the WPA, as members. (Because Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange are such giants, history has unfairly overlooked the many other talented artists who worked for Roy Stryker in the Farm Security Administration.)

Aaron Siskind, "The Wishing Tree, Harlem, 1937"

Aaron Siskind became a well-known teacher, and as a member of the Photo League he had the idea of the Harlem project: Ten photographers (Max Yavno and Morris Engel included) documented life in the poor black neighborhood of Manhattan and then staged exhibits around New York to show the results. Unfortunately, in Siskind's re-edited version of the project, the images tended to reinforce stereotypes of impoverishment.

Arthur Leipzig, "Ideal Laundry, 1946"

In 1951 the Photo League members were blacklisted for leftist leanings but had already made their mark in paving the way for street photographers. Soon MoMA and other important venues would accept street photography into their exhibitions. After the group was disbanded, Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin turned to cinema and made the wonderful "Little Fugitive" which is available on DVD.

Jerome Leibling, "Butterfly Boy, New York, 1949"

The exhibit is on view through Jan 21 at the Jewish Museum in San Francisco then goes to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach through April 2013.
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Death To The Fascist Insect!

By Stephen J. Gertz

It's Death To The Fascist Insect That Preys Upon The Life Of The People Day at Booktryst. On this day thirty-eight years ago, Patty Hearst was on the lam with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

She had, on April  3, 1974, announced that she was now one of them and had adopted the pseudonym "Tania." Now she was in prep for her debut, on April 15, as an urban guerilla bank robber. Death To The Fascist Insect Blah, Blah, Blah, was the SLA's mission statement, radical politics at its buggiest.

In its dehumanization and abstraction of the individual it's a line, however, that Joseph Goebbels would have been proud to call his own, except, of course, for the anti-Fascist part. No little irony there. No matter  the politics,  the wider the division the more they all begin to look, sound, and behave alike until you reach, as here, the absurdum ad reductio, a Fascist anti-Fascist motto that, out of context, reads as a parody of political propaganda. But no laughing matter. When  radical extremists act out individuals tend to die.

The Secularist's Adopted Grandfather
N.p., n.d. [ c. late 19th century].
Handbill with unattributed woodcut.
 
Flanking the woodcut is text reading,
"Secularists, are you proud of your Grandfather?"
and " We should respect our Parentage - Dr. Darwin."
A previous owner has inscribed the words,
"Orang Outang - horrid beast - I am not like you in the least."

And so on this day we celebrate polarization in American politics. It's poisoning our political landscape but makes for entertaining, if somewhat frightening, reading when radicals of both the Right and Left come out to play, commit themselves to their cause in print, and wreak havoc on rational discourse. The fright aspect is heightened when one considers that radical seems to have  become the new mainstream and moderate the new extreme. 

International Workmen's Association. North American
Section, Pacific Coast Division, Organizer's Circular.
[San Francisco]: International Workmen's Association, [c. 1881].

Buried in the text is an offer to members of a "scientific and
comprehensive course of chemistry," i.e. explosives training.

Coincidentally. Lorne Bair, the social and political history rare literature specialist, has just issued a new catalog, delightfully devoted, as usual, to the often strident and out there voices of yesteryear, reminding us that extreme political expression has always been a part of the American character, an All-Terrain Vehicle cycling though the American psychic velodrome. Now, however, the stakes are higher, and we need to get the poles back on the true American path, a bicycle built for two heading in one direction. Good luck and God help us all.

BOYCOTT Campbell's Cream of Exploitation Soup -
In Support of Mid-Western Farm Workers.
Toledo: FLOC [Farm Labor Organizing Committee], c. 1980s.

"Mmmm, Mmmm, [not so] Good."

When Campbell's Soup refused to negotiate with Ohio
farmworkers, a brilliant functionary of FLOC appropriated
Andy Warhol's classic pop image and created a propaganda
poster that sharply crystallized their message without
inflammatory slogans or wild-eyed declarations of evil.
The boycott worked. In 1986, Campbell's finally sat down
and entered into a collective bargaining agreement.

FAGAN, Myron C. Moscow Over Hollywood.
Los Angeles: R.C. Cary, 1948.

Josef Stalin looms over Tinseltown in this, the foundation
document of the Hollywood Blacklist, preceding the notorious
Red Channels by two years.

Note the cinematic chorus line, presumably singing and
dancing their hearts out during a performance of
The International while a sinister director looks on with
satanic satisfaction.

Protection To American Labor and American Industries.
New York: Ballin & Berman, 1888. Silk bandana.

Republican souvenir of the 1888 election, based upon
the campaign's Protection v. Free Trade issue.

Department of Strange Political Metamorphoses:
In 1888, the Republican Party was anti-Free Trade and pro-Labor.
Their Presidential candidate, Benjamin Harrison, won the election.

The Most Exciting Story of the Century Will Be Printed
in the Utica Saturday Globe.
Utica: Utica Saturday Globe, 1889.

The post-Civil War period saw more than one brand
of white-hooded racist. Here, the Utica, NY Globe advertises
a series of exposés based upon an undercover agent's
infiltration of The White Caps, a vigilante group based in
southern Indiana and contiguous counties in Kentucky and
Ohio. By 1900, the White Caps had disbanded or had been
hijacked by local Ku Klux Klan chapters, which, apparently,
believed that their territory wasn't big enough for the both of them. 
How can you tell them apart?

Is There a Pink Fringe in the Methodist Church?
If so, what shall we do about it?
Houston: The Committee For the Preservation of Methodism, 1951.

Exposé of the Methodist Federation for Social Action,
a faith-based organization following the precepts of
Jesus Christ, written by Methodist followers who
had forgotten them in the midst of paranoia.

WHARTON, Charles S. The House of Whispering Hate.
Chicago: Madelaine Mendelsohn, 1932. A presentation copy.

If only the current U.S. House of Representatives
kept their snarls at a whisper.

Actually, a memoir of three years imprisonment at Leavenworth.
But it might just as well been a memoir of three years imprisonment
in Congress, for most of us a fate worse than death.

491 years ago, on April 19, 1521, Martin Luther stood before the Diet of Worms and proclaimed in defense of his convictions, "Here I stand. I can do no other. May God help me. Amen." It is Western Civilization's preeminent statement on individual liberty, conscience, and thought.

Now, however, that eloquent declaration has become debased coin, its currency counterfeit in a culture that has gone mad with self-interest. Martin Luther has transmogrified into Sammy Davis singing I've Got To Be Me (Whether I'm Right. Whether I'm Wrong. What Else Can I Be But Who I Am)," the national conversation deep in schlock-infested waters, the  cacophony of political savagery the diet of worms in the U.S. Diet, leaving the rest of us undernourished.

It's the result of political movements that assert, as Sammy did in that anthem of juvenile yearning, "I won't settle down. I won't settle for less, as long as there's a chance I can have it all."

Calling Dr. Spock...

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All images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, Manuscripts & Ephemera, with our thanks.
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