Guso pictures league professional#

In contrast to its forerunner organisations, Photo League members were from the beginning also interested and engaged in discussions about aesthetic values in their work. “It affected my whole life.”Īlthough the League had roots in proletarian photography initiatives, few of the members who joined after 1940 (despite most being self-proclaimed social activists with left-leaning sensibilities) were aware of its political origins. “Everybody used to go to his house to look at photographs and discuss each other’s work,” Cherry once remarked.

The Photo League School was led by Grossman himself, who over the next 15 years would become something of a father figure to the 1500-odd students that passed through its classes in Basic Technique and Documentary Photography.Ī famously eccentric character, Grossman’s personal experiences living in severe poverty (his teeth had rotted when he was a teenager because he couldn’t afford to see a dentist) had cemented his belief in photography’s potential to change poor social conditions. Establishing a school, studio and salon, the Photo League HQ soon became a hive of activity for the city’s young, aspiring photographers, fostering a network of both professionals and amateurs who met regularly to learn and discuss the medium. In 1936, the League moved into its predecessor’s headquarters at 31 East, 21st Street, inheriting a large studio space with five darkrooms that it rented out to non-members for a nominal fee. Under the guidance of the influential photographers Paul Strand and Berenice Abbott, the 23-year-old Grossman and Libsohn renamed the original group the Photo League, articulating a mission to put the camera in the hands of honest photographers with an intention to photograph America. The US branch that grew out of it was called the Film and Photo League, and was comprised of a set of independent groups located in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and a few other cities – mostly just connected by a tenuous ideological link and a mutual belief in documentary film as an instrument for radical social change.īy the mid-1930s, the filmmakers of the NYC group had separated and formed their own organisation Frontier Films. The League had its origins in the Communist-associated worker's photography movement that emerged in the early 1930s, establishing groups of photographers in a range of cities around the world to provide the left-wing press with films and photographs of workers' activities. However, while the Photo League set out to document social conditions, it would turn out to champion photography as an art form in the process. Founded in 1936 by Sid Grossman and Sol Libsohn, the Photo League was born in the era of the Great Depression and the New Deal, when poverty and social problems were too deep and consuming to allow any public commitment to art and aesthetics to flourish in a crowded city like New York.

Guso pictures league professional#

They also encapsulate the vision and work of the Photo League, the progressive collective of amateur and professional photographers who Cherry was a student and member of. Shocked, Cherry pressed the shutter, freezing the harmless yet intensely socially and politically charged moment forever.Ĭherry’s Game of Lynching images were, and still are, chilling to take in – radical in any context but particularly so when seen in light of a post-war America riddled with anxiety about political criticism and social commentary.

The boys – black, white and Hispanic – took turns playing the victim, dropping their heads to the side and simulating a dangling motion as if hanged by a rope. After roaming the streets for a while, she came across a group of children tugging and pulling at each other in what appeared to be a friendly game of lynching. Only one year after an infamous mass lynching in Georgia in 1946, a young and inexperienced New York photographer by the name of Vivian Cherry grabbed her camera and headed towards East Harlem to take pictures for a course assignment.