Photo League

The Photo League was a cooperative of photographers in New York who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. The League was active from 1936 to 1951 and included among its members some of the most noted American photographers of the mid-20th century.

The League’s origins traced back to a project of the Workers International Relief (WIR), which was a communist association based in Berlin. In 1930 the WIR established the Worker’s Camera League in New York City, which soon came to be known as the Film and Photo League. The goals of the Film and Photo League were to “struggle against and expose reactionary film; to produce documentary films reflecting the lives and struggles of the American workers; and to spread and popularize the great artistic and revolutionary Soviet productions.”

In 1934 the still photographers and the filmmakers in the League began having differences of opinion over social and production interests, and by 1936 they had formed separate groups. Paul Strand and Ralph Steiner established Frontier Films, to continue promoting the original goals, while at the same time Strand and Berenice Abbott renamed the original group “The Photo League”. The two organizations remained friendly, with members from one group often participating in activities of the other. The goal of the newly reformed Photo League was to “put the camera back into the hands of honest photographers who ... use it to photograph America.”

The League quickly became active in the new field of socially conscious photography. Unlike other photography organizations, it did not espouse a particular visual style but instead focused on “integrating formal elements of design and visual aesthetics with the powerful and sympathetic evidence of the human condition.” It also offered basic and advanced classes in photography when there were few such courses in colleges or trade schools. A newsletter, called Photo Notes, was printed on a somewhat random schedule depending upon who was available to do the work and if they could afford the printing costs. More than anything else, though, the League was a gathering place for photographers to share and experience their common artistic and social interests.

Among its members were co-founders Sol Libsohn and Sid Grossman (director of the Photo League School); Walter Rosenblum, editor of the Photo League Photo Notes; Eliot Elisofon, a Life magazine photographer; Morris Engel (since 1936); Jerome Liebling, who joined in 1947; Aaron Siskind; Jack Manning, a member of the Harlem Document Group of the League and a New York Times photographer; Dan Weiner; Bill Witt; Martin Elkort; Lou Bernstein; Arthur Leipzig (since 1942); Sy Kattelson; Louis Stettner; Lester Talkington (from 1947); Lisette Model; and Ruth Orkin, a member from 1947.

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