The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League 1936-1951 (review)

The Radical Camera sets out to reassess one of the seminal moments of twentieth-century documentary photography, the New York Photo League. One of the most successful photographic organizations of its time, the League's blacklisting in 1947—due to alleged communist affiliations—saw the end of an era in which a broadly humanist outlook was at the forefront of photographic practice. As such, The Radical Camera is designed to champion a form of photography in which the Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War, although historically present, are visualized through the recording of daily lives both touched and untouched by the seismic events surrounding them. Instead, most of the work in The Radical Camera takes as its subject matter the everyday lives of New York's inhabitants.

The book version of The Radical Camera, which includes a large selection of the 150 photographs by 73 photographers shown at the exhibition of the same name, provides a series of essays by Mason Klein, Maurice Berger, Catherine Evans, Michael Lesy, and Anne Wilkes Tucker to contextualize the photography in historical and social terms. While Anne Wilkes Tucker's "A Rashomon Reading" provides insight into the League's political travails and Catherine Evans's "As Good as the Guys" into the undervalued contribution by women to the League, it is the photographs themselves as much as the overriding subject matter of the League that give a sense of how the everyday lives of urban citizenry became a photographic strategy.

Together with a renewed interest in the architectural dimensions of the city the League emphasized a more vibrant image of New York as a multi-faceted location in which a history of immigration and integration were paramount. In The Radical Camera, the recording of this is seen as a distinctly Jewish effort. According to Mason Klein in "Of Politics and Poetry: The Dilemma of the Photo League," "What distinguishes the League's treatment of photography was not the belief that its work could effect social change, as is generally surmised, but that its members, predominantly Jewish, working-class, and first-generation Americans living in a multiethnic city—were fascinated with the city's composite nature and strongly identified with it" (21). Many of the photographers were, indeed, from working class and/or Jewish backgrounds but the foregrounding of this at times inadvertently homogenizes what was in reality a very diverse set of photographers. It also, in some ways, becomes an unspoken way of disengaging the movement from later, more modernist impulses as it tends to equate the Jewish sensibility with a predominantly social outlook.

In reality, most of the photographers straddled a variety of photographic movements, producing work with modernist, surrealist, and formalist leanings from the onset. If anything, the League's members excelled in capturing the continuous interaction between a political desire to expose the realities of city life with a focus on the urban as a valid subject for more subtle lyrical explorations.

The photographer Weegee's idiosyncratic look at the drama of urban life is perhaps the most obvious example of how an identification with the city can be one of wry amusement as well as social critique. Weegee enjoyed being asked to both exhibit and speak at the League but struggled to overcome his image as a lucky tabloid photographer with a good instinct for dirt and where to find it. Weegee's position did not come out of an uncultured, non-aestheticized knowledge of photographic practice but was part of his self-fashioned persona as part sleuth, part entertainer—a pose born out of the desire to counter an existing tradition of "concerned" photography. The images in the Radical Camera can be read as—if not counter efforts to the Farm Security Administration's focus on the agrarian—then efforts to make the urban, the streets of New York City, another equally crucial cipher for American life, a vision in which...