The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951

Sid Grossman, Coney Island, c. 1947

The exhibition at The Jewish Museum gives a terrific overview of the history and work of the The Photo League during its existence from 1936-1951.

Formed in 1936 in Depression-era New York, the work of The Photo League began as providing a social and class conscious visual document of the city. The photographs offer a look at 1930s and '40s urban life until the group was blacklisted and disbanded in 1951, in the climate of Cold War paranoia.

Working at the same time as the Farm Security Administration photographers were working to document farm conditions and rural places of the American landscape, The Photo League set their sights on the urban environment. Precursors in social documentary photography, such as Jacob Riis or Lewis Wickes Hine, seem to have influenced the vision of both FSA and early Photo League photographers. The 1930s photographic lens was focused on social inequalities, poverty, and discrimination. The idealistic and socially progressive photography of the 1930s gave way after the beginning of World War II. The FSA ended in 1944, but The Photo League persisted a bit longer, until 1951. As the political and social environment of the country had altered after the war, so too did the vision of The Photo League, but there continued to be a tender and piquant focus on the human experience of everyday life in the city.

Walter Rosenblum, Disturbed Woman, Pitt Street, 1938

Bill Witt, The Eye, 1948

Bernard Cole, Shoemaker's Lunch, 1944

Leon Levinstein, Untitled, n.d.

Morris Engel, Harlem Merchant, 1937

Rebecca Lepkoff, Broken Window on South Street, 1948

Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy, 1949

Lucy Ashjian, Untitled (Relief Tickets Accepted), c. 1939

The Lost and Found Photographs of Vivian Maier

Not a lot is known about European-born Vivian Maier other than that she moved to the United States in the 1950s and lived in New York for about five years before moving to Chicago, where she worked for the majority of her life as a nanny. By day she may have been working as a caretaker, but she was also privately becoming a very gifted photographer. She spent countless hours scouring the streets with her Rollei camera, practicing the art of documenting her surrounding, urban environment. It's a shame that her photographs did not come to light before she passed away in 2009. It is also no wonder that in the three short years since her work was discovered, it has quickly gained great esteem. When John Maloof bought a storage locker at auction without knowing its contents, he stumbled upon a treasure chest, a time capsule in the form of thousands of prints and negatives, providing a glimpse of the faces, places, and essence of a bygone era.
Her work has been likened to that of all-stars of the medium, such as Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. These are some very large boots to fill, but after seeing her photographs one can see that Vivian Maier fits snugly within the cannon. Her carefully composed portraits of people, places and passing moments of everyday, urban life capture everything that we love about street photography.

Vivian Meier's photographs are currently on view at both the Howard Greenberg and Steven Kasher galleries in New York.
You can also see and learn more at www.vivianmaier.com