Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman: Two Pioneering Women of The Photo League
Monroe Gallery of Photography presents an exhibition of photographs by two important and pioneering women photographers, Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman. Opening Gallery talk April 21 with managers of the photographer’s estates, Joe Meyer, son of Sonia Handelman Meyer, and Heather Garrison, granddaughter of Ida Wyman. The exhibition continues through June 18, 2023.
The Photo League was a collective of photographers active between 1936-1951 who believed their work could change poor social conditions and champion photography as an art form in the process. The Photo League thrived as one of the most progressive, dynamic and creative centers for photography in America, and was unusual in its time as many of the collective’s members were women.
In the 1940s when McCarthyism started gathering momentum in the US, suspicious authorities decided to clamp down on the Photo League’s confrontational and uncensored representations of urban American society. In 1948, it was declared a subversive organization and blacklisted. As the league’s secretary at the time, Sonia Handelman Meyer answered the office phone when requests for comment about the accusations poured in from the media. “It got to be too much,” she told The New York Times. “They were blacklisting people”.
Both photographer’s work went unrecognized for decades. In recent years, there has been a revived interest in the radical collective that contributed incomparably towards promoting early street photography as an art form.
About the Authors
Sonia Handelman Meyer was an American photographer, best known for her street photography as a member of the New York Photo League.
Meyer was born in Lakewood Township, New Jersey, in 1920.
She was in the first graduating class of Queens College, New York in 1941. She discovered photography in 1942 while she was a civilian worker at Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico, for the U.S. Army Signal Corps.[
Returning to New York in the 1940s, Meyer was a member of the New York Photo League from 1943 to 1951, as both photographer and secretary. Following World War II, she photographed Jewish Holocaust survivors in New York. She participated in the 1949 exhibition This is the Photo League.
After the dissolution of the Photo League in 1951, Meyer’s work went largely unrecognized until 2006 when it was rediscovered by a gallery owner in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In 2014 the Mint Museum in Charlotte presented the exhibition Bearing Witness: The New York Photo League and Sonia Handelman Meyer. In 2019 she was included in the exhibition Modern Women: Modern Vision, Works from the Bank of America Collection at the Tampa Museum of Art. Meyer died in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 11, 2022, at the age of 102.
Ida Wyman is one of the most fascinating artists in photography today. When Ida first started her photography career in the 1940s as a magazine photographer, an industry that was almost exclusively male at the time, she started out as a “girl” mailroom boy at Acme Newspictures (later UPI) and worked her way up from there. A trail blazing and innovative photographer, Ida has inspired many photographers, both male and female.
Ida strives to capture everyday life of everyday people in all its frustrating, illogical and banal glory. From her classic Girl with Curlers photograph of a little girl on the street in LA staring defiantly at the viewer to the delicate symmetrical composition of Wrought Iron with Snow, Ida photographed what moved and inspired her.
You can easily connect the dots between many artists photographing today with Ida Wyman. Her unique brand of street photography helped define a fledgling style still trying to define itself. Street photography has since evolved, but the roots Ida helped lay with others such as Arthur Fellig, Ruth Orkin and Arthur Leipzig are still visible. Although not as famous as some of her contemporaries, Ida was one of the defining artists of early street photography that helped shape how we look at our world.
Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman: Two Pioneering Women of The Photo League
04-21-2023/ 06-18- 2023
Monroe Gallery – Santa Fe, NM, United States, New Mexico
More info on:
https://www.monroegallery.com/
https://soniahandelmanmeyer.com/
(cover picture by Sonia Handelman Meyer)
