LEE SIEVAN, On Leave, 1946, 9.5x7.5" Gelatin silver print, Printed c. 1946, Signed, titled, and dated in pencil with photographer's stamp on print verso.

Lee Sievan (1907-1990) one of the few women photographers in the Photo League took classic street scenes in New York. She was married to the artist Maurice Sievan (1898-1981).

The Photo League's origins can be traced back to a project of the Workers International Relief (WIR), a communist association based in Berlin. In 1930 the WIR established the Workers Camera League in New York City, which soon came to be known as the Film and Photo League. The new organization served to record workers everyday lives and to fight with the help of a camera for proletariat rights, adopting the best practices of progressive Soviet photographers. As time passed, the Film and Photo League became known as a cooperative of photographers and documentary film makers. In 1934, these two groups began having differences of opinion over social and production interests, and by 1936 they had split into separate organizations. Paul Strand and Ralph Steiner founded the Frontier Films Company, and at the same time Strand together with Berenice Abbott created the Photo League cooperative.

The main goal of the Photo League was to "put the camera back into the hands of honest photographers who ... use it to photograph America." In New York in the middle of the 1930s the question of adherence to the ideas of the proletarian revolution was not so acute as in the USSR, and the Photo League did not espouse a particular visual style but instead concentrated on "integrating formal elements of design and visual aesthetics with the powerful and sympathetic evidence of the human condition."

The League organized master classes led by Sid Grossman, Walter Rosenblum, and LIFE editor Eliot Elisofon. All those wishing to learn more about modern photography attended free lectures by such photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roy Stryker, Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Robert Capa, and others. The Photo League held six exhibitions annually; each was accompanied by an issue of Photo Notes (1938-1948).

In December 1947, the Photo League was formally declared a subversive and placed on a U.S. Department of Justice blacklist of subversive organizations by Attorney General Tom C. Clark. Following this announcement, the Photo League appeared on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations, published on March 20, 1948, in the Federal Register.

At first the League fought back and mounted an impressive This Is the Photo League exhibition in 1948, but after its member and long-time FBI informer Angela Calomiris had testified in May 1949 that the League was a front organization for the Communist Party, the Photo League was finished. Recruitment dried up and old members left, including one of its founders and former president, Paul Strand, as well as Louis Stettner. The League disbanded in 1951.

CREDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_League
https://www.jewish-museum.ru/en/exhibitions/new-york-s-photo-league/

Excellent. Minor wear. Blue staining on verso of print.