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.

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

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.

Current Exhibition "Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color" in the Press

 

Blind Magazine: In a League of Her Own: Ida Wyman, Girl Photographer in a World of Men

The Albuquerque Journal - Ida Wyman captured the ordinary through an extraordinary eye.

"Despite the fact Wyman did not live to see her book published, her work is receiving its proper due in the new exhibition in Santa Fe, Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color, which showcases a recently discovered collection of Ektachtomes Wyman made at the age of 21."

"Her photographs reveal the exceptional within what initially might appear unremarkable. The images trumpet Wyman’s abiding curiosity about the human condition."

The Santa Fe New Mexican Pasatiempo -  Ektachrome moments: The color work of Ida Wyman

"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.” 

The Eye of Photography: Monroe Gallery : Ida Wyman : East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color

"Reflecting the related practices of documentary photography, photojournalism, and street photography, these images are a testament to Wyman’s abiding curiosity about the human condition and the complexity of human experience, both familiar and unfamiliar.

View the exhibition here

In a League of Her Own: Ida Wyman, Girl Photographer in a World of Men

 

Via Blind

By Miss Rosen

March 17, 2021

A new exhibition looks at rare color photographs of documentary photographer Ida Wyman made on the streets of New York in the 1940s.

American photographer Ida Wyman (1926–2019) achieved her every dream except one — the opportunity to publish her illustrated memoir Girl Photographer: From the Bronx to Hollywood and Back before she died. Though Wyman was humble, she never lacked for confidence or nerve, becoming one of the few women photographers working for Look and Life magazines in the 1940s.

 

 

Park Avenue Archway, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

As with many things, Wyman was ahead of the times. “She never wanted to be the most famous,” says Heather Garrison, her granddaughter and executor of the Ida Wyman Estate. “I think in her later years she finally understood how important her journey was as a woman in a male dominated industry. She took meticulous notes and records, and had her archive well organized. She wanted to put it all into one piece.”

Despite the fact Wyman did not live to see her book published, her work is receiving its proper due in the new exhibition in Santa Fe, Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color, which showcases a recently discovered collection of Ektachtomes Wyman made at the age of 21. The only color body of work from the period, Wyman’s photographs offer a poignant portrait of working class life in New York after the war. Neither activist nor ethnologist, Wyman was a humanist with a profound love for street portraiture. She eschewed the term “street photography,” seeing it as an anachronistic term to describe the documentation of urban life.

 

Street scene in East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

A Magical Process

Born to Askenazi Jews who immigrated to the United States, Wyman was born in Malden, Massachusetts, and raised in the Bronx, where her family ran a small grocery store. “Ida was very practical and frugal, and a lot of that came out of necessity, how her parents raised her, and the era she grew up in,” Garrison says of Wyman’s childhood throughout the Great Depression. “She had a lust for life, and found that in normal, accessible ways: laughter, music, dancing, and beauty in the most ordinary things.”

 

The shoe shine man, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

At the age of 14, Wyman bought a camera and immediately got to work documenting her community and joined the Walton High School Camera Club, where she learned to develop and print photographs. “[Photography] seemed like a magical process, allowing me to hold forever on film what my eyes saw and my heart felt, as I explored the various neighborhoods of New York City,” Wyman wrote in an artist statement.

Bernard Hoffman, a staff photographer at LIFE magazine, met with students of the camera club, and encouraged Wyman to pursue her dream of becoming a professional photographer. After graduating high school in 1943, Wyman took a job at age 16 as the first “girl” mailroom boy at Acme Newspictures. After being promoted to printer, Wyman purchased a 3¼ x 4¼ Graflex Speed Camera, loaded up her film holders, and took to the street during her lunch break.

 

Guess your age, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

The Keymaker, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

After three years at Acme, Wyman came to understand her true passion was not in news photography but in making photo essays and telling stories of daily life. She created assignments for herself, crafting a body of work that she could sell to picture magazines. In 1945, Wyman sold her first story to Look. It was fortuitous timing, for that fall she lost her job at Acme after the company dismissed her in order to give her position to a returning military veteran.

“Photography has enabled me to understand the lives of others, lives different in experience and age from my own.”

A League of Her Own

In 1946 Wyman married Acme staff photographer Simon Nathan, who introduced her to Morris Engel, a member of the illustrious New York Photo League. “I considered myself a documentary photographer, and the League’s philosophy of honest photography appealed to me,” Wyman wrote in Girl Photographer. “I also began to understand the power of photographs to help improve the social order by showing the conditions under which many people lived and worked. Even after leaving the League the following year, I continued to emphasize visual and social realities in my straightforward photographs.”

Stickball on St. Nicholas East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

Wyman’s photographs in East Harlem are a testament to a shared vision of photography as a tool to amplify the political, economic, and social issues of the times. But Wyman was not overtly political with her work; she sought to tell a story without using it as a cudgel. Her vibrant color photographs of working class life are empathetic but devoid of a moralizing tone; she sees her subject as equals worthy of veneration as individuals, rather than objects to serve a larger agenda.

“Everyday life and where it was happening was what interested me,” Wyman said in her artist statement. “Taking pictures enabled me to hear the stories of the people I photographed, which satisfied an immense curiosity to learn and understand the lives of others, lives different in experience and age from my own.”

Man with guitar, East Harlem, 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

Bobby Soxer Makes Good

Although Wyman could be shy, the camera afforded her the ability to engage with people and connect, creating a space for mutual recognition. Her photographs are imbued with tenderness and intimacy, in no small part due to the fact that she sought to obtain her subjects’ consent before making the photograph.

“She would introduce herself and ask permission,” Garrison says. “She was able to connect with people and put them at ease. Even though the photograph was candid and unposed, she was never trying to surprise them or grab the shot. Connecting with people brought her a lot of joy.”

Man on Fire Hydrant, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

The stringless Banjo, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

As one of the few professional women photographers working at the time, Wyman could move through the streets openly without catching people off guard; that they may have underestimated her worked to her advantage every time. Garrison explains, “She was a girl in bobby socks taking pictures and I think people were endeared to that. They would relax because it was a girl taking pictures — no big deal, no stress, no high stakes. She got better photos because people were at ease and not putting on airs for the photograph.”



By Miss Rosen

Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer focusing on art, photography, and culture. Her work has been published in books, magazines, and websites including Time, Vogue, Artsy, Aperture, Dazed, and Vice, among others.


Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color
Through April 11, 2011
Monroe Gallery, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
https://www.monroegallery.com/

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: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color featured on The Eye of Photography

 

February 22, 2021

Via The Eye of Photography

"This series of color Ektachromes Ida Wyman made of East Harlem in 1947 was discovered in her archive only recently, and exist as the only color body of work from that period. Her photographs reveal the extraordinary within the urban landscape.  Reflecting the related practices of documentary photography, photojournalism, and street photography, these images are a testament to Wyman’s abiding curiosity about the human condition and the complexity of human experience, both familiar and unfamiliar."

Full article.

View the exhibit here

View a short biographical film about the pioneering Ida Wyman here.

Video: Ida Wyman, East Harlem, 1947 in Color

 

View the exhibition on-line here

Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color

 

Ida Wyman: Hands in pockets, East Harlem, New York, 1947

Santa Fe, NM -- Monroe Gallery of Photography is honored to announce an exhibition of rare color photographs Ida Wyman made in East Harlem, New York, in 1947. The exhibit opens in the Gallery (no reception)  and on-line at www.monroegallery.com on Friday, February 12 and continues through April 11.

East Harlem in 1947 was a neighborhood of immigrants from poor and working class backgrounds. In the Depression and New Deal era of the 1930s, the Photo League was formed to document poverty and other social problems. Ida’s youthful idealism attracted her to the League, and several League photographers embarked on a mission to document conditions in Harlem.

Her photographs reveal the extraordinary within what, at first glance, might appear to be otherwise unremarkable. Reflecting the related practices of documentary photography, photojournalism, and street photography, these images are a testament to Wyman’s abiding curiosity about the human condition and the complexity of human experience, both familiar and unfamiliar.

This series of color Ektachromes Ida made of East Harlem in 1947 were discovered in her archive only recently, and exist as the only color body of work from that period.

Although not as famous as some of her contemporaries, Ida was one of the defining artists of early street photography that helped shape how we look at our world. Wyman’s photographic vignettes of life in urban centers and small towns in the United States, taken during the mid-twentieth century, illuminate the historical moment while providing a deeply humanist perspective on her subject

Ida strived to capture everyday life of everyday people in all its frustrating, illogical and banal glory.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ida Wyman was born March 7, 1926 in Malden, Massachusetts. The family soon moved to New York, where her parents ran a small grocery store in the Bronx. Her parents bought her a box camera when she was 14, and she joined the camera club at Walton High School, honing her skills at taking and printing pictures. By the time Wyman was 16, she know that she wanted to work as a photographer. Opportunities then were few for women photographers, but in 1943 Wyman joined Acme Newspictures as a mail room ‘boy’; pulling prints and captioning them for clients. At lunch hour, she photographed nearby laborers and office workers with her Graflex Speed Graphic camera.

When the war ended, Acme's only female printer was fired so a man could have her job. Wyman set out on her own to begin free-lance work for magazines, and her first photo story was published in LOOK magazine the same year. By 1948 she was in Los Angeles, working on assignments for LIFE magazine. She would eventually cover over 100 assignments for LIFE.

For the next several years, Wyman covered assignments for LIFE, Fortune, Saturday Evening Post, Parade, and many other leading publications of the time. Her varied assignments always focused on human-interest stories, which have become a hallmark of her work.  From 1951 through 1962, Wyman took time to raise a family, as well as handling many corporate assignments.  From 1962 to 1968 she created photographic documentation for speech research projects at Haskins Laboratories in New York City.  From 1968 to 1983, Wyman was the Chief Photographer in the Department of Pathology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.  In 1983 she again returned to free-lancing, and handled assignments for The New York Times, Gannett Newspapers, US Magazine, American Lawyer, Inc. Magazine, and other publications.  Throughout her career, Wyman held numerous teaching positions and speaking assignments.  Her photographs are in the collections of the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Jewish Museum of New York, Fundación Municipal de Cultura in Valladolid, Spain, and other collections. She died July 13, 2019 at age 93.

Current Gallery hours are 10 to 3 Monday - Thursday, 10 to 4 Friday and Saturday, admission is free. Covid-19 safety protocols must be followed and face masks are required throughout your gallery visit. Gallery capacity is limited to no more than 10 visitors..

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