The Jewish Museum will premiere a photo series Friday called The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League 1936-1951, a tribute to a group of photographers, most of them recent Jewish immigrants, who set out to document the gorgeous, gritty realities of New York in the early 20th century.

In 1936, a press release by the museum reads, a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Members of the League rejected the modernist style of the time to champion realism, exploring ordinary people and everyday neighborhoods day by day.

The League's headquarters was combination school, darkroom, gallery and salon, where photographers explored both their art and the world reflected within and changed by it. One of its leading members, Sid Grossman, pushed students and eventual peers to examine not only the meaning of their work, but their relationship to it, causing a shift from, as The Jewish Museum notes, bearing witness to questioning one's own bearings in the world.

By the time the League dissolved in 1951, the organization had become known throughout New York and the American art world for combining the expressive might of documentary photography with the progressive, often socialist-leaning causes of the photographers themselves. Most images are beautiful. Some are stark. Almost all note the disparities of class, race and opportunity in New York City, while still embracing its ordinary, day-by-day wonders.

The Radical Camera shows the New York Photo League's journey, and that of America, through the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II and into the opening acts of the Cold War. Explore these amazing photos in advance of the exhibit's opening on Friday (the show closes March 25), and dive into the world of a byegone New York.

Hudson river
"Boy Jumping into Hudson River" (1948) by Ruth Orkin. Orkin was a photogrpaher, filmmaker, and late additon to the New York Photo League. Best known for international work like "American Girl in Italy" (1951), she said that "being a photographer is making people look at what I want them to look at." Jewish Museum/REUTERS
quotDancing Schoolquot 1938
"Harlem Dancing School" (1938) by Sol Prom (Solomon Fabricant). Prom is known for his later portraits of shoeshine boys, including "Boy Standing," which will be featured at the Jewish Museum. Jewish Museum/REUTERS
quotConey Islandquot 1947
"Coney Island" (1947) by Grossman. Grossman co-founded the Photo League with Sol Libsohn, and his coverage of labor union activity helped the organization become blacklisted by the FBI as a communist organization in 1947. Jewish Museum/REUTERS
quotBrooklyn Bridgequot 1938
"Brooklyn Bridge" (1938) by Alexander Alland. Alland, a Russia-born Turkish immigrant, saw being American as sharing "the desire for happiness, prosperity, and liberty." Jewish Museum/REUTERS
quotButterfly Boyquot 1949
"Butterfly Boy" (1949) by Jerome Liebling. Liebling, a distinguished photographer and teacher, took this photo of a young boy in Harlem and his oversized cloth "wings," two years after joining the Photo League. Jewish Museum/REUTERS
quotIdeal Laundryquot 1946
"Ideal Laundry" (1946) by Arthur Leipzig. Leipzig is one of the best-known photographers of the New York Photo League, known especially for his portraits of the 1940s. Jewish Museum/REUTERS
quotHarlem Scene 133rd Street Between Lenox and Fifth Avenuesquot 1930s
"Harlem Scene" (1930s) by Sid Grossman. Grossman's early work captured regular New Yorkers going about their life. By the '40s, he had begun to take pictures with subjects out of frame and staring back at the camera, a more surreal move to make the viewer "an engaged participant." Jewish Museum/REUTERS
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