Shooting the Streets: The New York Photo League’s Radical Lens

• In Event: Radical Jewish Politics in the Street through Photography, Literature, and Violence

Abstract

The New York Photo League was a cooperative of mostly Jewish street photographers that operated formally from 1936 until it disbanded in 1951 as a result of FBI blacklisting. The group was characterized by its progressive politics and leftism, which, as William Meyers put it, gave them “a way of seeing” that shaped their aesthetics. However, there is a disconnect between the group’s overarching ideological leanings and the lack of overt politics in most of their works. For example, their oeuvre contains relatively few pictures of protests and generally lacks a clear political message. This paper will place the works of members of the League in dialogue with the broader genre of street photography from the late 1800s through the 1950s in order to discern the nature of the radical change they introduce. I argue that their key innovation is a move away from 'typological' or ‘iconographic’ representations of the human subject in favor of an embrace of the motion and anarchy of the urban encounter. This ‘iconographic’ form of representation can be seen in key social photography projects such as those of Jacob Riis (1890s), Lewis Hine (1910s) , and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) (1930s). The photographers of these projects had clear social goals, such as advocating for relief for the poor or ending child labor, and the majority of their photographs offer aestheticized ‘iconographies’ of poverty and suffering designed to evoke sympathy. By contrast, a striking aspect of the photographs of the Photo League is the playful defiance and dignity of their subjects—regardless of their class or race. League photographer William Klein associated the sense of movement and flux in their photographs with their Jewishness, which he saw as the driving force behind their “funky,” jazz-like perspective. One question this paper will grapple with is why the lenses of leftism and Jewishness would have shaped their visual corpus in this manner, and will answer it with a focus on how these photographers used urban photography to create a new form of “imagined community” that could incorporate leftist, secular Jewish immigrants and children of immigrants into its fold.

Author

• Shirelle Maya Doughty, University of California, Berkeley