At a time when much of New York City life was lived outdoors, a group of young, mostly Jewish photographers set out to capture the vitality of the city across neighborhoods, ages, ethnicities, and social classes. In reaction to the art photography of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, and the dramatic cityscapes of Alfred Stieglitz and Berenice Abbott, they worked at street level, recording the everyday routines of city life. Just as the writer and critic Alfred Kazin brought to life the sights and smells of working-class New York in his memoir, A Walker in the City, so too did these photographers walk the streets, creating a complex and pulsing portrait of the people’s city.
Deborah Dash Moore, a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan, provides a thoughtful and informative overview of the everyday New York of the 1930s through the 1950s, as documented by these young Jewish photographers. Many of them got their start with the New York Photo League, a cooperative founded in the 1930s. It offered inexpensive classes and darkroom facilities and attracted a broad range of young men and women. They were drawn to the excitement and possibilities of the new field of photography, as well as fellowship and intellectual discussion. Progressive and left-leaning, the League’s members saw socially conscious photography as a way to push for change.
The city offered a vast canvas on which to work. With no air-conditioning and few private phones, people gathered on stoops and street corners. They conducted their social and business lives in public, open to the photographers who roamed their neighborhoods freely. At the same time, during the mid-thirties, the city saw an expansion of major public and private works — parks, swimming pools, Rockefeller Center, new subway lines, housing, the Triborough Bridge and Midtown Tunnel — challenging some of the objectives of the Photo League, which stressed intimate photography over large-scale cityscapes. World War II further challenged the League photographers. Many served in the armed forces, some as photographers. The city to which they returned was thriving and offered commercial photography opportunities in journalism, fashion, business, advertising, and sports. Social activism was no longer at the fore as photography became a profession. Street photography persisted, but it shifted from a social to an ethnographic sensibility.
Moore organizes the photographs into six sections — ”Looking,” “Letting Go,” “Going Out,” “Waiting,” “Talking,” and “Selling” — which allows for comparison and coherence. She comments extensively on both the photos and the photographers themselves. As with many books of photography, given the strictures of layout, the comments on the photos often do not appear on the same spread as the photos, leading to a little digital gymnastics.
Moore also examines what drew these second-generation Jews to photography. The sons and daughters of East European immigrants, many from poor and difficult backgrounds, these young photographers experienced the life they photographed — playing in the streets, living in diverse neighborhoods, relying on their street smarts and their going to public school — and used their cameras to expand their boundaries and better understand their city and their place in it.
Maron L. Waxman, retired editorial director, special projects, at the American Museum of Natural History, was also an editorial director at HarperCollins and Book-of-the-Month Club.
