Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents A Personal Letter to Each Member
May 1942
How much does the Photo League mean to you? Do you want to see it keep on growing, or as far as you're concerned, can it just fold up and die a quiet death? That probably sounds tough--but it's meant to. For any organization to live, be vital and contribute something--it's got to have a living, vital, working membership--people who will work for and with it, people who want it to keep on existing, and people who need what it can give them. The Photo League has gotten lots of compliments lately. Dorothea Lange has written that there is no place she would rather show her work than in our galleries. Steiner gave us a spread in PM. Recently, when a man from the Office of the Co-Ordinator of Inter-American Affairs set out from Washington for pictures of American life to be exhibited in Mexico, he was advised: "Go to the Photo League. You'll get what you want there." And at a recent conference at the Museum of Modern Art, Lt. Commander Steichen was asked if and organization existed where alert, intelligent documentary photographers were encouraged, he replied "Yes. The Photo League." But it takes more than compliments to keep an organization alive and important. We, of the Executive Committee believe that the Photo League has something definite to offer during these war times, that it can be a great force for good--and we'd like to see that happen. But we feel that as photographers and League members we are too inclined to carry on the same as we did before Dec. 7, 1941. A lot depends on you members. What are you doing about it? For instance, a call went out recently for prints to be donated to the soldiers to liven up their quarters. Did you send any in? Another recent very worthwhile and timely project is "Women Are Soldiers Too." Are you getting behind this idea and working at it? And finally, now is the time to make up a permanent file of members' work--to have the best representative pictures on hand all the time, so that when calls come in for work of League members, those pictures will be on tap and available at a moment's notice. Frequently calls come in from magazines and agencies for pictures on all phases of the war effort. Here's where you can participate strongly. Go out and take pictures--of everything that depicts the change in our way of life due to war conditions--and bring them in for the League file. Certainly when it becomes known that such a file exists, there will be many more calls. Let's make the League the important and useful organization it can and should be.
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