Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photography of Midcentury New York

In this luminous collection, historian Moore (Urban Origins of American Judaism) spotlights the work of Jewish members of the 1936–1951 New York Photo League, who captured the “eye-level” interactions that played out in the city’s streets, alleys, and storefronts. Their “distinctive urban vision” located the profound and poetic within rhythms of working-class city life, according to Moore. For example, images shot by Harold Corsini, Sid Grossman, and Helen Levitt depict in-motion jitterbug dancers, surly-faced men lined up for work, and children waiting outside the Hebrew Aid Society on the Lower East Side, gazing at the camera with an “intensity... that speaks to their unusual maturity and their experiences as survivors of the Holocaust.” While the artists’ styles differ—Berenice Abbott’s 1935 photo of the bustling Garment District, taken from above, is distant and imposing, while many of Sonia Handelman Meyer’s up-close shots seem to rest upon a tacit trust between photographer and subject—all negotiate boundaries of class and race, as “left-wing radicalism flourished” among many Jews in the 1930s and galvanized these photographers to document “the lives of those they considered most vulnerable to the riptides of capitalism” even as they negotiated their own place in the city. The result is a virtuoso ode to the power of street photography. (Sept.)