Cameras for Class Struggle

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Cameras for Class Struggle
The radical documentarians of the 1930s Workers Film and Photo League offer a model for today’s artist-activists.
artnews.com
7:32 AM · Apr 22, 2021

https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/cameras-for-class-struggle-workers-film-and-photo-league-1234590463/

In 1930, Wilhelm Münzenberg—a German Communist Party activist and millionaire media mogul—sent an envoy to New York to set up an office for his pro-Soviet publishing empire. Münzenberg’s most successful newspaper, the weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Worker’s Illustrated Newspaper, or AIZ), had a circulation of around four hundred thousand at the time and a readership of nearly one million. AIZ resembled the other illustrated weeklies that dominated newsstands in the first half of the twentieth century, insofar as it relayed the news visually, pairing eye-catching photo essays with short texts in a bid to make current events engaging for everyman. But where commercial publications like the French pictorial magazine Vu mixed international current events with gossip and fluff, AIZ took a more rigorous approach to the only story its editors felt mattered: the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

In order to tell that story, however, the magazine needed photographers on the front lines of the class war, and the existing photo agencies in the US weren’t getting the shots it needed. When Münzenberg’s delegates arrived in Manhattan, they rented a loft near Union Square and began recruiting photographers for a news association that would circulate images to sympathetic magazines and tabloids around the world, not just to AIZ, but also US outlets like Fortune, the Daily Worker, and Labor Defender.

The group’s formation coincided with a boom in labor organizing and leftist populism, brought on by the misery of the Great Depression and the harrowing exploitation of farm and factory workers at the hands of fat cat industrialists. In the course of the 1930s, nearly 50,000 Mexican and Filipino agricultural workers—often led by organizers from the Communist Party USA—joined successive waves of strikes against the lethal working conditions and meager pay rates of California farms. In the streets of Minneapolis, union teamsters armed with metal pipes defended their general strike in open combat with cops and hired thugs, culminating in the “Bloody Friday” of August 1934, when police officers shot sixty-seven protesters. That same year in San Francisco, striking dockworkers paralyzed waterfront industry for four days, winning union recognition in ports up and down the West Coast.

The left was so emboldened in the interwar years that Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs won nearly a million votes–more than 3 percent of the popular vote—in the 1920 presidential election while serving a federal prison sentence for sedition. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which proposed surges in public spending that would seem radical in today’s political landscape, was roundly denounced by prominent labor groups for continuing capitalism as usual. “Never before or since have American Communists been more like the fish that swims in the sea of the people,” Vivian Gornick wrote in The Romance of American Communism, her 1977 oral history of this intense, anomalous moment. The Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL), as the organization came to be called, sought to boost revolutionary fervor by capturing these uprisings, and the workers driving them, in both still and moving images.

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