New Book on The Photo League: “Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York”

Via NY Jewish Week

September 27, 2023

A multi-generational group of people congregate on a building stoop on Hester Street; an African-American man leans on a lamppost; a gaggle of teenagers pile on top of each other at the beach in Coney Island; a hoard of children — in various states of undress — play with a broken mirror in the street. 

These are only a few examples of the 150 black-and-white snapshots of New York City street life in the 1930s and ’40s that appear in the new book “Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York” by historian and scholar Deborah Dash Moore. The photos are the work of the New York Photo League, a group of socially conscious street photographers whose aim was to showcase the living conditions of the city’s working class, as well as spotlight their everyday lives and relationships.  (click for full article)

Dash Moore will be in conversation with Manhattan Borough Historian Robert W. Snyder at the Center for Jewish History on Thursday, Sept. 28.

Related: SONIA HANDELMAN MEYER & IDA WYMAN: TWO PIONEERING WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE PHOTO LEAGUE

A league of their own

 Via Pasatiempo

May 5, 2023

By Brian Sanford

In one image, an older woman sits on a bus, clutching her purse and looking pensive. In another, a man, his face obscured, gazes searchingly into an armpit-high trash bin. In a third, six children congregate in an empty lot with four-story row housing visible in the distance, their faces registering no signs of discomfort.

To observers in 2023, these septuagenarian images by two Photo League members offer candid views of daily life in a handful of American cities, primarily New York, as the shadow of World War II falls away. The images show little of the suffering that’s common in photographs from the Great Depression 15 years prior or the Vietnam War 15 years later. Yet to U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark in 1947, the images of real life were sufficiently objectionable to land the Photo League on a list of groups considered “totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive.”

The league was a collective of photographers, many of whom were women or first-generation Americans, who thought their work could improve social conditions in the United States. The collective had endured since 1936 but couldn’t survive the power-mad paranoia of McCarthyism, when a mere accusation of harboring communist sympathies was enough to destroy an association, a career, a life, a family. The league’s placement in 1948 on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations was the beginning of the end — preventing members from selling their work or getting passports — and it shuttered in 1951.

That’s 73 years ago. Remarkably, Sonia Handelman Meyer only recently died in 2022, at age 102, and Ida Wyman in 2019, at age 95. Work by both is featured in Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman: Two Pioneering Women Photographers of the Photo League, running through June 18 at the Monroe Gallery of Photography. The exhibit primarily features photographs from 1946 through 1950.

Sonia and Ida embrace at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida during a Photo League exhibit in 2013. 

Courtesy Joe Meyer/Monroe Gallery of Photography

At the exhibition’s opening April 21, Wyman’s granddaughter Heather Garrison and Meyer’s son Joe Meyer told a standing-room-only crowd about what inspired their famous photographer family members.

“If you’re wondering what a radical looks like, this old lady here in our backyard, this is what they look like,” Meyer says, pointing to a recent color image of his then-silver-haired mother. “Eventually, they can relax in front of the pond and chill out.”

Meyer then shows an image of his mother from her days in the Photo League, her hair still dark as she playfully balances herself while seated on a bucket, shooting the photographer a side-eyed look.

“This is what a radical looks like back in the day, when they were really active,” he says, proudly adding that his mother was born the year the 19th Amendment was ratified, granting women nationwide the right to vote. That was 1920, eight years after New Mexico became a state.

Meyer says his mother continued working, giving lectures and signing prints, until her death last September.

Sonia Handelman Meyer, Girl on stairs, New York City (c. 1946-1950)

courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

Sonia Handelman Meyer’s Boy wearing mask features a child tying his shoes while gazing impassively at the camera. In Girl on stairs, a little girl wearing a blouse stands in a stairwell, illuminated by light from the window behind her.

“She loved children,” Meyer says, while showing the audience Children playing in vacant lot, which he calls one of his mother’s most-loved images. ”You know, they’re the hope, and they’re innocent. And these kids, they’re having fun in their vacant lot. There’s no grass, but they’re going to make do, and they’re going to have fun. That touched her, and she captured it.”

Sonia Handelman Meyer had a twin-lens reflex camera, allowing her to look down and see exactly what the images she took would look like once they were developed, rather than having to gaze through a viewfinder and get an approximation. The technological setup allowed her to take photographs without being noticed, her son says, as she didn’t need to raise the camera to eye level.

“She had this like-minded circle of friends; she was kind of left-leaning, as the Photo League was,” he says of his mother’s ideology. “She was anti-war, pro-human rights, pro-women’s rights and equality, you name it.”

She also was afraid — of her government. While the Photo League resisted its demise at first, a member and longtime FBI informant testified in 1949 that the league was a front organization for the Communist Party.

“My parents lived underground in Philadelphia for three years because they were so freaked out, and she was freaked out about the FBI knocking on the door until the day she died,” Meyer says.

Photography funding

Garrison, showing the crowd the only known photo of Wyman’s first camera, says Wyman had to beg her father for the $5 to purchase it. Wyman got an unwanted lesson in overcoming adversity when the camera was stolen at a Woolworth’s store, but she saved enough from babysitting jobs to buy a replacement and joined the camera club in high school.

After graduating at age 17, Wyman had plans to enroll in nursing school but was still a minor.

Ida Wyman, Sidewalk Clock, New York City (1947); courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

“She called up every photo editor in New York City and asked for work, and they all laughed and hung up,” Garrison says. “She also called the [Associated Press] and United Press International and ACME Newspictures, and only ACME asked her to come down, but they offered her a job in the mailroom. The mailroom had vacancies because the men were going to war.” ACME was a U.S.-based news agency that operated from 1923 to 1952.

Wyman was promised the ACME role would lead to photography work, Garrison says, but she instead became a printer — an interest maintained throughout her life.

“She began taking photos of children playing in the neighborhood, beautiful buildings with brick, and she just spent time walking around New York,” Garrison says of Wyman’s early career. “She had a talent for connecting with people. As a child I was embarrassed by this, because at every bus stop in New York, she would just strike up a conversation with a stranger.”

As Wyman gained a reputation and clout, she landed a dream assignment for Life magazine. Life, with its wide pages and widespread circulation, focused on photography from 1936 until it ceased weekly publication in 1972.

While doing work for Life was appealing, the subject matter was not. The assignment involved photographing a group of women in Beverly Hills, California, Garrison says.

“Her [takeaway] was that the men doing work for Life kind of got the real assignments, and the women were left with the fluff,” she says.

Wyman stepped away from photography when she had children, as childcare was not financially feasible. By the time Wyman was ready to re-enter the workforce years later, Garrison says, she no longer received assignments and took a job as a medical photographer.

After a cancer scare, she decided at age 57 to rededicate herself to freelance feature photography, forgoing the pension she would have received had she kept her previous job.

“The staff and friends thought that she was crazy for leaving all this behind and going to an uncertain world,” Garrison says. “But she said nothing focuses the mind more than a near-death experience.”

Wyman continued printing in the second bedroom of her New York City apartment well into her 60s, her daughter says.

“I remember that when visitors were coming, we would move the bins of chemicals out of her bathtub so they wouldn’t see this darkroom in her bathroom,” Garrison says.

Wyman took photographs regularly into her 80s, Garrison says — recently enough that she was able to try her hand at digital and cellphone cameras. While she didn’t care for either, Garrison says, she acknowledged the luxury of not having to transport heavy photography equipment.

Sonia Handelman Meyer, Bus Stop, New York City (c. 1946-1950)

 courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

Gallery owners Michelle and Sid Monroe say 1946 to 1950 was a time of great change in the U.S. in general and in New York City in particular, with an influx of immigrants integrating into an optimistic society.

“We are beginning to describe ourselves as the world’s model of democracy,” Michelle Monroe says of the U.S. at the time. “We saved Europe, we vanquished the Japanese. When you put into context what these photographers’ mission was, that directly contradicted this new description of America. ‘What do you mean, you’re the world’s model for democracy? Look at these children. Look at the conditions that they’re living in.’

“People have been incredulous, asking how these possibly could be deemed threatening. Well, let’s go back to the culture of America post-World War II. They were in direct opposition with the narrative that the McCarthy era was describing. When we explain that to people, they’re like, ‘I got it.’”

Meyer and Wyman met — but not in their Photo League days. An exhibit in New York about a decade ago featured a photograph of them embracing at a museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, says Sid Monroe.

Michelle Monroe adds, “As women, they understood that they couldn’t be pushy, because you know what would happen if you were a pushy woman back then. But they knew how to get things done on the down low, so to speak, and I think that served them well for their entire lives.” ◀

Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman: Two Pioneering Women Photographers of the Photo League

10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, through June 18

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave.

505-992-0800, info@monroegallery.com, monroegallery.com

More reading:

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951 (Yale University Press, First Edition, 2011), a hardcover coffee table book by Mason Klein and Catherine Evans, features 150 photographs by Photo League members.

REMEMBERING THE RADICAL WOMEN OF NEW YORK'S PHOTO LEAGUE

 Via Huck Magazine

April 26, 2023

By Miss Rosen

A new exhibition revisits the work of Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman, who devoted themselves to social justice and chronicling daily city life as part of one of the most progressive art collectives in US history.

In 1936, a group of predominantly Jewish-American photographers in New York City came together to form The Photo League, dedicating themselves to using the camera in the ongoing fight for social change. By the ‘40s, the League’s roster included luminaries like W. Eugene Smith, Berenice Abbott, Paul Strand, Lisette Model and Weegee, with women accounting for more than a third of their membership at a time when gender equity in the industry was extremely rare.

Standing at the vanguard of art and activism, the League was dedicated to supporting the struggles of American workers through the Depression and the start of the post-war boom – only to be targeted by the FBI during the early years of the Red Scare. In 1947, the US Department of Justice blacklisted the Photo League as a “subversive organisation,” putting members at risk of government persecution.

The League rallied but was ultimately no match for the state, which used a paid informant to destroy the photography collective in court. Although the League finally disbanded in 1951, its legacy lives on in both the work of its members and their shared commitment to human rights.

Sonia Handelman Meyer

Sharp dressers on the corner, Spanish Harlem (1946-1950) 

In a new exhibition, gallerists Sid and Michelle Monroe revisit the groundbreaking work of two photographers whose work as gone unrecognised until recent years: Ida Wyman (1926-2019) and Sonia Handelman Meyer (1920-1922).

Joe Meyer, manager of the Sonia Handelman Meyer Estate, remembers his mother as an artist and activist who first took interest in social issues as a teen. “When she joined the Photo League in her mid-20s, she found a new medium to share her radical ideals with an even broader audience,” he says.

Handelman Meyer attended rallies and participated in boycotts, devoting herself to civil rights, environmental and anti-war causes. Standing at the frontlines, she was tear gassed during protests in Washington D.C., charged by a mounted policeman in New York, and had rocks thrown at her during the 1949 Peekskill Riot.

In an artist statement written in her later years, Handelman Meyer recounted her work for the League photographing at an anti-lynching rally in Madison Square Park, at a Jehovah’s Witness convention in Yankee Stadium, and at the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, as well as chronicling daily life in New York, which she descried as “rough-edged, tender and very beautiful in its diversity.”

After the League shut down, Handelman Meyer packed up her prints and negatives and went underground for three years, fearing repercussions of her involvement. She lost track of League members, focusing her energy on raising a family and photographing nature instead.

After a series of events brought her work back into the public eye in 2007, Handelman Meyer, then 87, was finally able to receive the recognition she deserved. Charged with purpose, she picked up where she left off, passing along the mission of the Photo League to a new generation of photographers.

Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman: Pioneering Women of the Photo League is on view April 21 – June 18, 2023, at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Capturing Humanity: Photography exhibit explores snapshots of New York’s ordinary people

 

Via The Albuquerque Journal

BY KATHALEEN ROBERTS / JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

Sunday, April 23, 2023

Two pioneering women photographers who were blacklisted by the Red Scare share wall space at Santa Fe’s Monroe Gallery of Photography.

Both Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman were members of the Photo League. The league was a collective of photographers active from 1936-1951, who believed their work could change poor social conditions and champion photography as an art form. It thrived as one of the most progressive, dynamic and creative centers for photography in the country. About one-third of its members were women.

Handelman Meyer and Wyman roamed the streets of New York, capturing the humanity of ordinary people. In some ways, their gender helped them remain invisible to the people they photographed.

“There was a great advantage to being a woman at that time, to be considered as no consequence,” gallery co-owner Michelle Monroe said.

Handelman Meyer learned about socially engaged photography in workshops by one of the Photo League founders Sid Grossman.

She captured three boys affecting tough guy poses after chasing her down the streets of Spanish Harlem demanding that she photograph them. She also shot “Boy Wearing Mask, New York City” (1946-1950), an image less mysterious that it seems.

“He was playing cops and robbers,” Monroe said. “The way he’s looking at her; there’s a lot of ambiguities about that child. Was he playing? Is it mistrust? Was it just an interruption from an adult? He’s just playing.”

Wyman photographed for Life and Business Week magazines, as well as her own enjoyment. Her work went unheralded for decades.

She was 19 and working in Manhattan as a photo printer for the Acme Newspictures agency when she photographed several men in Manhattan’s garment district in April 1945. One held up a copy of The Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish-language newspaper, as the others read about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. Wyman’s “Looking East on 41st Street, NYC” (1947) down a canyon of skyscrapers captures the majesty and industry of the city.

“Men of the Garment District Read of President Roosevelt’s Death, NYC, 1945,” Ida Wyman. (Courtesy of Monroe Gallery)

Before Handelman Meyer and Wyman, women were often assigned to shoot department store openings, Monroe said.

In 1947, the Photo League appeared on a long list of organizations identified with the Communist Party. Efforts to counter the allegation included a large exhibition, “This Is the Photo League.” But in 1949, Angela Calomiris, a Photo League member and F.B.I. informant, publicly testified that members of the organization were Communists. The League disbanded in 1951, a casualty of the Red Scare.

The league’s secretary at the time, Handelman Meyer answered the office phone when requests for comment about the accusations poured in from the media. She also received threatening calls.

“It got to be too much,” she told The New York Times. “They were blacklisting people. There were photographers who could not get their passports for overseas jobs. Little by little, it dissolved.”

When the league closed, Handelman Meyer put her photos and negatives in boxes and moved on with her life. They wouldn’t be opened for many years.

In the early 1940s, the list of notable photographers who were active in the league or supported their activities also included Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, Helen Levitt, Farm Security Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein, Beaumont Newhall, Nancy Newhall, Richard Avedon, Weegee, Robert Frank, Harold Feinstein, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Minor White.

‘Two Pioneering Women Photographers of the Photo League’

Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman

WHEN: Through June 18

WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., Santa Fe

CONTACT: 505-992-0800, monroegallery.com

Save the date: Two Pioneering Women Photographers of The Photo League Gallery Talk April 21

 

SONIA HANDELMAN MEYER and IDA WYMAN

TWO PIONEERING WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE PHOTO LEAGUE

Opening Gallery talk April 21 with managers of the photographer’s estates, Joe Meyer, son of Sonia Handelman Meyer, and Heather Garrison, granddaughter of Ida Wyman. The talk starts promptly at 5:30, seating is limited and RSVP is essential. Zoom registration here. The exhibition continues through June 18, 2023.

The Photo League was a collective of photographers active between 1936-1951 who believed their work could change poor social conditions and champion photography as an art form in the process. The Photo League thrived as one of the most progressive, dynamic and creative centers for photography in America, and was unusual in its time as many of the collective’s members were women.

In the 1940s when McCarthyism started gathering momentum in the US, suspicious authorities decided to clamp down on the Photo League’s confrontational and uncensored representations of urban American society. In 1948, it was declared a subversive organization and blacklisted. As the league’s secretary at the time, Sonia Handelman Meyer answered the office phone when requests for comment about the accusations poured in from the media. “It got to be too much,” she told The New York Times. “They were blacklisting people”.

Both photographer’s work went unrecognized for decades. In recent years, there has been a revived interest in the radical collective that contributed incomparably towards promoting early street photography as an art form.

RSVP

Zoom Registration

Monroe Gallery announces representation of the Sonia Handelman Meyer estate

 Via Art Daily News

March 25, 2023

Sonia Handelman Meyer/Courtesy of Monroe Gallery of Photography

 Boy in mask, New York City, c.1946-1950. Gelatin silver print.

SANTA FE, NM.- Monroe Gallery of Photography has announced its representation of the Sonia Handelman Estate, and will exhibit a selection of lifetime and vintage prints at the 2023 AIPAD Photography Show in New York City March 31-April 2 and present a 2-person exhibit with Ida Wyman: “Pioneering Women of The Photo League” at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, April 21-June 18, 2023.

The Photo League was a collective of photographers active between 1936-1951 who believed their work could change poor social conditions and champion photography as an art form in the process. The Photo League thrived as one of the most progressive, dynamic and creative centers for photography in America, and was unusual in its time as many of the collective’s members were women. In the 1940s when McCarthyism started gathering momentum in the US, suspicious authorities decided to clamp down on the Photo League’s confrontational and uncensored representations of urban American society. In 1948, it was declared a subversive organization and blacklisted. As the league’s secretary at the time, Sonia Handelman Meyer answered the office phone when requests for comment about the accusations poured in from the media. “It got to be too much,” she told The New York Times. “They were blacklisting people”.

Sonia Handelman was born on Feb. 12, 1920, in Lakewood, N.J., and grew up in New York City. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. After graduating college in 1941, Handelman Meyer worked during World War II in the Office of War Information for the U.S. Signal Corps in Puerto Rico, and the Office of War Information in New York, and then at a news photography agency. In 1943 she joined the Photo League, where she studied with John Ebstel and Sid Grossman. She also served as secretary (the only paid position at the League) and, in 1948-50, as chair of the Hine Committee. She participated in several group exhibitions, including "This Is the Photo League" (1948–49). Handelman Meyer collaborated with Morris Huberland on a photographic series of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem (1947) and photographed in neighborhoods throughout New York. She later documented the Weavers, the American folk group that included Pete Seeger. Her photographs appeared in The New York Times (1947–48) and U.S. Camera Annual (1947). Her photographs also appeared in the exhibition "Photographic Crossroads: The Photo League" at the International Center of Photography, New York (1978) and "The Women of Photo League" at Higher Pictures Gallery, New York (2009).

Sonia Handelman Meyer died on September 11, 2022, at her home in Charlotte, N.C., at age 102.

Sonia Handelman Meyer’s work went unrecognized for decades. In recent years, there has been a revived interest in the radical collective that contributed incomparably towards promoting early street photography as an art form.

Ektachrome moments: The color work of Ida Wyman

 Via Pasatiempo

March 5, 2021

By Michael Abatemarco

Ida Wyman with two of her cameras in an undated photograph

The golden age of street photography, photojournalism, and documentary photography lasted from the 1930s to the 1950s. It was an era that saw the birth of a number of influential photography agencies and collectives, including Magnum, founded in Paris in 1947, and New York’s Photo League, founded in 1936. Many of their number were among the most respected photographers of their day, including Magnum’s Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Photo League’s Paul Strand and Arthur Leipzig.

Most of the images that came out of the era were in black and white, partly because color printing was more expensive and less stable, and most news agencies and magazines only printed in black and white. “Color negates all of photography’s three-dimensional values,” claimed Cartier-Bresson.

Stickball on St. Nicholas Avenue, East Harlem, 1947

Ida Wyman: East Harlem, 1947 in Color is a selection of 14 photographs on exhibit at Monroe Gallery drawn from a series called Lost Ektachromes. The photographer, who was a member of the league, came across the negatives sometime around 2010. They remained undeveloped until then because Wyman, who was proficient at printing in black and white, lacked the expertise to do her own color printing. She needed to find someone she could trust who could print them with fidelity and under her supervision.

“She was already in her 80s,” says Wyman’s granddaughter Heather Garrison, who manages the estate. “She always said she wanted to do an exhibit on this work. And as we catalogued it, we found additional pieces.”

Wyman (1926-2019) was “no slouch,” says Michelle Monroe, co-owner of Monroe Gallery of Photography, adding that she shot more than 100 assignments for Life magazine throughout her career as a freelance photographer. Her work exemplified the cooperative’s focus on capturing the human condition in America’s urban and rural settings at mid-century.

“It was really one of the first movements to use photography as a social documentary tool,” says gallery co-owner Sidney Monroe.

The work in the show includes portraits, street scenes, and candid images of people. Some are street vendors selling their wares. Some sit on stoops engaged in conversation, and some are merely walking or otherwise going about their day. As a whole, it’s a simple snapshot of life in the city.

The Key Maker, East Harlem, 1947

East Harlem was a neighborhood of immigrants and the working class poor. As a photographer, she had an ethos in line with that of the Photo League, although she was not yet a member at the time the photos were taken. And none of them were shot as an assignment but purely to indulge her own enthusiasm for the medium. Wyman was also experimenting with a new kind of film. Ektachrome was only developed in the early 1940s. The work languished in her archives, in part because Wyman never achieved the notoriety of her contemporaries until late in life, and she was never focused on showing her work publicly in galleries or museums.

“Ms. Wyman — whose work for Life, Look and other magazines went largely unheralded for decades — discovered what she called a ‘special kind of happiness’ in photographing subjects like a little girl wearing curlers, a peddler hauling a block of ice from a horse-drawn cart and four boys holding dolls, pretending to be the plastic girls’ fathers,” wrote Richard Sandomir in Wyman’s New York Times obituary (“Ida Wyman, Whose Camera Captured Ordinary People, Dies at 93”). Perhaps that’s because Wyman, like many of the subjects she photographed, came from a working-class family. Her parents were Jewish immigrants in Malden, Massachusetts, who later owned a small grocery store in the Bronx.

Soon after graduating from high school in 1943, Wyman started working in the mailroom at Acme Newspictures. Eventually, she was promoted to photo printer. Her intention was to spend a year working before starting nursing school. “She was always fascinated by science and medicine,” Garrison says of Wyman, who got her first box camera at 14. But in the interim, her love of photography superseded other ambitions.

Wyman spent her earnings on film and processing. “On her lunch breaks and in her spare time she just loved to walk the city and take pictures,” Garrison says. “Then she would have a body of work that she could show.” Determined to land assignments, she reserved these bodies of work to show to editors.

Wyman had no job security at Acme. When the men came back from the war, Wyman and women like her were out of a job.

However, her career in photography was just beginning.

The Shoe Shine Man, East Harlem, 1947

Over the course of the next six years, she worked as a freelancer, taking assignments for Fortune, Look, Life, and Parade, among other publications. “She had the usual soft assignments, like for the Saturday Evening Post,” Michelle Monroe says. “If there was a grocery store opening, ‘send the woman.’ She wasn’t picky. She wanted the work. I think it was very hardscrabble working as a woman without the affiliation of a publication directly.”

But Wyman was motivated. Garrison says she landed assignments through sheer perseverance. “I give her a lot of credit, a young girl — 18, 19, 20, 21 — especially in a man’s world, walking into these offices and self-advocating,” Garrison says.

Wyman was encouraged to join the Photo League on the advice of her husband, photographer Simon Nathan, but in the early 1950s, the demands of family life temporarily curtailed her career. When she returned to photography in the 1960s, it was as a photographer in medical fields. She was chief photographer at the department of pathology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons from 1968 until 1983 when she returned to freelancing.

“Her varied assignments always focused on human interest stories, which have become a hallmark of her work,” Garrison says.

That’s what we see in her black-and-white photographs, but also in the Ektachromes. And like her monochromatic work, the contrasts are stark, the shadows deep and rich, befitting, perhaps, the work of one who’s not used to shooting in color. The palette is muted, giving them the appearance of hand-colored photographs, a technique that was common since the early days of photography. And they weave a similar kind of nostalgic spell. But unlike hand-coloring, their ethereal and dreamlike quality, says Michelle Monroe, was due in part to the city’s pollution.

The stringless banjo, East Harlem, 1947

“Most cities in, say, like the 1920s through the 1960s, were powered by coal,” she says. “There’s a lot of diffused light. Coal hung around the lower city so much. There’s such a softening of the air from that particulate. Margaret Bourke-White taught us that — not directly, but in studying her work.”

But it’s the joyous aspects of the familiar and the sense of commonality that also make them captivating.

“She always had an eye for people,” Garrison says. “She loved to connect with people, and I think that’s what made her photos so wonderful.” 

details

Ida Wyman: East Harlem, 1947 in Color

Through April 11

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., 505-992-0800, monroegallery.com

Ida Wyman’s Photography Documents Life in the 1940s and ’50s

"The News Girl" by Ida Wyman

Via Madison Magazine
By Katie Vaughn


What a gift to be able to document life—to capture a moment and preserve it, to put a small pause on the fleetingness of time but also share the way things were with viewers at points in the future.


Photographer Ida Wyman has a natural inclination toward this, and an exhibition of her work, The Chords of Memory, runs through May 4 at the James Watrous Gallery.


Wyman, a photojournalist turned artist, was raised in New York City, where she photographed the world around her starting as a teenager. She began her career in the 1940s, a time when men dominated the field, working at Manhattan’s Acme Newspictures before becoming a successful freelance photographer for Life, The New York Times, Collier’s, Fortune and other publications—from 1947 to 1951, she took on nearly one hundred assignments for Life alone! Now eighty-seven years old, she lives here in Madison.


The exhibition features a rich mix of mostly black and white images, many of them new prints from Wyman’s work during the 1940s and ’50s. A wide range of subjects are represented—children at play, city street scenes, people at work, men and women in their homes, rural scenes and more—but each photograph reveals Wyman’s knack for imbuing a sense of dignity and authenticity into regular people and everyday life.
“Showing ordinary people in their everyday activities is what interested me the most,” the artist is quoted in the exhibition. “Dignity and respect to my subjects have been just as important to me as a well-composed photo.”








Notes from Wyman are included with many of the photographs in the show. For instance, alongside “Girl with Hat and Chalk Lines, The Bronx, NYC, 1947,” an image of a child bent over to draw on the sidewalk, Wyman comments that the scene brought back memories of her own childhood in which “Life was in the streets.”


While her photographs take viewers to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Mexico, the Midwest and beyond, many are set within New York City, with it busy streets often serving as a setting.


Children, too, provide a thread through the show. In “Bleacher Boys—Yankee Stadium, The Bronx, NYC, 1944,” a row of five boys sit on bleachers watching a baseball game, their coats, hat and mitt resting in front of them. And “Checking Out the Game, Philadelphia, 1948” shows five kids huddled around a cement stoop playing a game.


Rounding out the exhibition are four cases holding photos of Wyman, books her photography is featured in and samples of her work for Life.
A blend of personal and historic perspectives, of photojournalism and art, The Chords of Memory offers a thoughtful and compelling introduction to the talented Wyman.


On the other side of the James Watrous Gallery, Kevin Miyazaki also explores memories and history with a keen curiosity in Camp Home.


The photographer opens his exhibition with “A Guide to Modern Camp Homes: 10 New Models & Plans to Persons of Japanese Ancestry,” a book inspired by a 1940s Sears, Roebuck and Company guide of modern home models. It’s a “fictional but factual” publication that examines the living conditions that displaced Japanese Americans encountered before and during World War II. Miyazaki uses pleasant commercial language to describe the barracks that served as internment camps.





Miyazaki also offers sixteen photographs from his Camp Home series, in which he documents the interment camps in northern California and northwest Wyoming—where members of his father’s family were forced to live during the war—that have since been adapted into homes, barns and other buildings.


His photographs reveal the corrugated metal siding of a building, a doorway opening to a field and small details such as a welcome sign on a front door, a tape measure nailed to a board and names carved into a wooden wall.




































No humans are included in his compositions, yet the artist approached the owners of the buildings before taking his photographs. Says Miyazaki, “I’m seeking family history—both my own and that of the current owners—and time is often spent sharing our own uniquely American stories. Family histories intersect and are connected by the history of those buildings and by the lives lived within their walls.


The Chords of Memory and Camp Home run through May 4 at the James Watrous Gallery. For more information, visit wisconsinacademy.org.




Photos courtesy of the James Watrous Gallery

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

The Photo League students take their camera anywhere . . . they want to tell us about New York and some of the people who live there . . . there was almost a sense of desperation in the desire to convey messages of sociological import.”
Beaumont Newhall, 1948

Via The Jewish Museum
In 1936 a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centered on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. The Radical Camera presents the contested path of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

Sid Grossman, Coney Island, c. 1947



Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy,
New York, 1949

Photographing the City
Members rejected the prevailing style of modernism in order to engage the gritty realities of urban life. Leaguers focused on New York, and this meant looking closely at ordinary people. That impulse spurred the group to explore neighborhoods, street by street, camera at the ready.

The League and Its Legacy
A unique complex of school, darkroom, gallery, and salon, the League was also a place where you learned about yourself. One of its leading members was Sid Grossman who pushed students to discover not only the meaning of their work but also their relationship to it. This transformative approach was one of the League’s most innovative and influential contributions to the medium. By its demise in 1951, the League had propelled documentary photography from factual images to more challenging ones--from bearing witness to questioning one’s own bearings in the world.

Mason Klein
Curator, The Jewish Museum, New York

Catherine Evans
Curator, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

Jack Manning (American, 1920-2001)
Elks Parade, 1939, from Harlem Document, 1936–40
Gelatin silver print
10 1/16 x 13 in. (25.6 x 33 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, 2008-95
© Estate of Jack Manning


Sid Grossman (American, 1913-1955)
Coney Island, c. 1947
Gelatin silver print
9 3/8 x 7 7/8 in. (23.8 x 20 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift, 2008-62
© Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

Jerome Liebling (American, 1924-2011)
Butterfly Boy, New York, 1949
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (24.1 x 24.1 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York
Purchase: Mimi and Barry J. Alperin Fund, 2008-90



The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 has been organized by The Jewish Museum, New York and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio.

The exhibition is made possible by a major grant from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Betsy Karel.

The exhibit opens November 4, and runs through March 25, 2012 and will then travel to the Columbus Museum of Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida.

See related article here

See related slideshow here

Ida Wyman's photographs are included in the exhibition

Ruth Orkin's photographs are included in the exhibition

Photographer captures life's curiosities

Via  The Wisconsin State Journal

Ida Wyman was sitting at her kitchen table in Fitchburg the other day, explaining why she hadn't taken more photos of a future U.S. president when she had the chance.
"I was there to cover Bonzo," Wyman said.

In November 1950, Life magazine sent Wyman to the set of "Bedtime for Bonzo," a film with a chimpanzee in the title role, supported by an actor named Ronald Reagan.

"He supposedly understood 500 commands," Wyman said of Bonzo. "He was short, like a little kid, but his grip was something else. He'd chatter at me, and I'd chatter back. He was very friendly."
She paused. "Reagan was friendly, too."

Wyman was holding a photo she took that day of Reagan holding Bonzo. "Who knew he was going to be president?"

Ida Wyman: Ronald Reagan with "Bonzo", California, 1950

Ida Wyman, 85, is a great American photographer who five years ago moved to the Madison area without a lot of fanfare. She has a granddaughter who lives here. And while Wyman has had a couple of exhibits of her work locally since then, she remains pretty much under the radar.

That may change when "Ida Wyman: Portraits of America," debuts Oct. 28 at the Paoli House Gallery. The exhibit runs through Nov. 20, and there will be an artist's reception from 5 to 9 p.m. Nov. 11. The Reagan-Bonzo photograph is included in the exhibit of some 30 images.

In addition, Wyman will be heading to New York City for the opening celebration early next month of "The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951," at the Jewish Museum.

Wyman was a member of the Photo League — which encouraged photographs of the gritty realities of ordinary New Yorkers — and her work will be part of the exhibit, which runs Nov. 4 through March 25.

"My style and outlook were compatible with the league," she said. "I was already shooting in a documentary style, not posed."

She got her start in the high school camera club, growing up in the Bronx borough of New York City, where her parents were grocers.

"Usually cash poor," Wyman said. "It took a lot of coaxing to get my father to give me $5 for my first camera."

It was a modified box camera, and Wyman toted it around the city, capturing people and scenes, driven by a curiosity that has not diminished, even all these years later.

"If I'm standing on line," she said — New Yorkers don't stand "in line," they stand "on line" — "I will get the story of the people in front of me."

The camera club taught her to develop film, and over time she learned about lighting, movement, shutter speed — the tools of her craft. Still, out of high school — she graduated early, at 16 —Wyman wanted to be a nurse, not a photographer. It turned out nursing students had to be 18.

She contacted New York newspapers and news services looking for work as a photographer, instead landing a job as a printer for Acme Newspictures.

When that ended in 1945 — the men returned from the war — Wyman began pitching photo story ideas to magazines like Look and Life. She made inroads with some editors and began hanging out at the Photo League. In 1948, she took a cross-country trip, taking photographs all the way, winding up in Los Angeles, where she spent several years.

The "Bonzo" assignment came then, as did another from Life that required Wyman to travel to northern California with Richard Nixon, who was running for the U.S. Senate in 1950 against Helen Gahagan Douglas.

Nixon spoke to miners at a gold mine — "his wife gave me a gold nugget," Wyman recalled — though the photo of Nixon in the Paoli exhibit will be one Wyman snapped in a northern California deli.

"He was genuinely friendly, one on one," she said of Nixon. "On stage, you never saw it."

What got her temporarily out of photography was raising her children. That was back in New York, and it was there, no longer married, that Wyman in 1969 went to work as chief photographer with the Department of Pathology at Columbia University.

In 1983, after a cancer scare, Wyman resolved to return to her true love, magazine photography. "People said I was crazy," she said, but she revived her career.

She came to Madison in 2006, and likes it here, though she wishes the buses came by her neighborhood more often. Afternoons, when the light in her condo falls just right, she gets inspired. She's working on a memoir. Beyond that, Ida Wyman will go where her curiosity takes her.

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com. His column appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

Copyright 2011 madison.com. All rights reserved.