Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents The Photo League School Hal Greenwald February 1947 The Photo League School is important because it is the only non-commercial photography school in America. It is unique in that it uses a progressive educational method: the student learns by doing. He becomes aware of the need to solve specific technical problems which arise in the course of the development of a visual idea. The school does not feel that photography should be taught in the old-fashioned inorganic manner in which the student is introduced separately and artificially to the various parts of the whole. In the commercial school the student learns that photography is concerned with such separate things as optics, chemistry, lighting, and printing. This course of instruction leaves a student totally unequipped to either conceive or solve living photographic problems. A photography school has a very real teak of not only providing a technical background, but of making the student a creative personal photographer. Instructors in the Photo League feel that their job is to help the student discover the world; to develop a personal, philosophic, and visual perception which would load to an individual direction in photography. The workshop idea is heart of the school's approach to teaching. Students are encouraged to go out and discover personal photographic ideas. This naturally involves all sorts of technical problems which are not discussed as abstract problems in photographic technique, but as rather, photographic factors which may or may not contribute to the meet heightened expression of the student's concept. To Sid Grossman, our school director, must go the major credit for evolving this enriching method of teaching photography. It is Grossman's contention that the relationship between the art form and life is a living thing. That means that the teacher selected and his method of instruction must be such that there is not the usual humdrum routine of the student "absorbing" knowledge, but rather a vital exchange between student and teacher which results in further knowledge and insight for both. To create a sense of excitement, enthusiasm, and pride in the use of the camera, and to stimulate a desire and need to find new ways of personal visualization of the social scene, requires that the teacher must be inspired with the meaning of photographic expression and an understanding of its tradition from the historical past to the present. It is on this basis that League teachers are selected and trained. Starting with the rich heritage of the photographic tradition (Hill, Atget, Hine, Stieglitz, Strand, etc.) and working by means of a research method combined with self-criticism, the goal is to advance to now achievement. For by understanding the tradition of photography through a critical examination of what the masters of the past and present have achieved and why, shore is created a basis for clearing away many of the misconceptions concerning photography and the laying of a foundation upon which an honest orientation may be made. There is, then, an appreciation of what the medium can and cannot do and a respect for one's materials, and how they are to be used honestly, i.e., by strictly photographic methods. This is the basis of pride in technique, print quality, etc., not as an end for themselves but to enable the photographer to most completely render the significance of his subject according to the level of his maturity or profoundness of his vision. The Photo League School is the training ground for the development of new photographers who will build and add to the best of photographic expression. It is especially oriented towards Photo League members. All but the Beginners Classes have been so designed as to fulfill the specific needs of our own photographers. The Workshop and Advanced Workshop Classes allow the student to work on specific problems, in conjunction with other photographers, under competent direction.
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