In 1936 a group of young, idealistic photographers, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centered on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art.

Many of the original members of the League were first-generation Americans in their early teens and twenties, the children of immigrants who had settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in Brooklyn, or in the Bronx. Born between 1900 and 1925, these New Yorkers came from working-class families and had low-paying jobs. For the majority of League members, photography was a means of integration into American society, and many of them went on to become respected photojournalists and professional photographers.

Left to right: Sid Grossman, Coney Island, c. 1947; Lisette Model, Albert-Alberta, Hubert's Forty-second Street Flea Circus, New York, c. 1946; Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy, New York, 1949.

A unique complex of school, darkroom, gallery, and salon, the League was also a place where members learned about themselves. One of its leading members was Sid Grossman who 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. By its demise in 1951, the League had propelled documentary photography from factual images to more challenging ones--from bearing witness to questioning one’s own bearings in the world.

Operating out of a loft on East 21st Street, the Photo League provided members with low-cost darkroom facilities and technical instruction. The League also published an important newsletter, Photo Notes; offered courses in photographic history; sponsored lectures by the most famous photographers of the time; and organized social activities, such as “Photo Hunts” and “Crazy Camera Balls.” As the only noncommercial photography school in America at the time, the Photo League was poised, by 1947, to realize an ambitious plan to become the Center for American Photography. That plan was cut short after the League appeared on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations in December 1947.

Although a few members of the League, including Sid Grossman, may have been members of the Communist Party, the claims of subversion were never substantiated. Nonetheless, the Photo League was forced to disband in 1951 after an FBI informant testified that it was a front organization for the Communist Party. McCarthyism and the second “Red Scare” swept the country.

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo Leaue, 1936-1951 opens tomorrow and continues through March 25, 2012 at The Jewish Museum. 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92^nd Street, NY, NY. The exhibition will then travel to the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL. Information.

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