May 16 at 12:00 PM - Sale 2669 -

Sale 2669 - Lot 85

Estimate: $ 700 - $ 1,000
EDWARD SCHWARTZ (1906-2005)
Williamsburg Bridge, New York City. Silver print, the image measuring 9½x7¼ inches (24.1x18.4 cm.), the sheet slightly larger, with Schwartz's stamp on verso. Circa 1948-49

Provenance: Acquired directly from the Photographer; to a Private Collection in New Jersey

Edward Schwartz joined the Photo League in 1938 and began taking photographs of New York City's immigrant neighborhoods. He served in WWII, and then worked as Berenice Abbott's assistant. In 1948 or 1949 Schwartz completed a documentary film titled Around New York, which was about daily life in the Lower East Side. In 1949 Angela Calomiris testified that Schwartz was the section organizer of the Photographic Group of the Cultural Section of the American Communist Party.

The Photo League was a cooperative of amateur and professional photographers for whom socially conscious photography was a powerful and expressive tool to both document and explore the human condition. Without espousing a particular aesthetic, the Photo League's members created imagery that was informed by both interest in and interrogation of documentary techniques, as well as a sharp aesthetic perspective. Over the course of 15 short by intense years, which saw the end of the Great Depression, WWII, and political transformation, the leftist and radical Leage elevated and interrogated social realism, the role of the photographer, pushed street photography to new levels, while simultaneously contributing significantly to advocating for photography as an art form.

The group had its origins in the Film and Photo League, an offshoot of Workers International Relief, which was an organization that supplied the left-wing press with images of working-class life. The filmmakers, under Paul Strand, eventually formed the production company Frontier Films. The photographers, led by Sid Grossman and Sol Libsohn, founded the Photo League in 1936 (Berenice Abbott and Strand named the group). Initially operating out of a loft on East 21st Street, the Photo League provided members with low-cost darkroom facilities and technical instruction. The League also published a newsletter called Photo Notes, offered courses in photographic history, sponsored lectures, and organized social activities such as "Photo Hunts" and "Crazy Camera Balls." In addition to the photographs represented here (see lots 73, 75, 78, 83, 84, 85), the group included or was supported by photographers such as Ruth Orkin, Louis Stettner, Margaret Bourke-White, Aaron Siskind, Arthur Leipzig, Ruth Orkin, W. Eugene Smith, Arthur Rothstein, Richard Avedon, Weegee, Robert Frank, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and many more.

In 1947, the League was blacklisted under McCarthyism, for its alleged involvement with the Communist Party. Despite support by prominent photographers, a passionate issue of Photo Notes, and an exhibition This is the Photo League, the group could not overcome the powerful sweep of the Red Scare and was forced to disband in 1951.
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