Sid Grossman

Sid Grossman was an American photographer, teacher, and social activist.

Sid Grossman was the younger son of Morris and Ethel Grossman. He attended the City College of New York and worked on a WPA street crew. In 1934, he started what would become the Photo League with co-founder Sol Libsohn. Grossman played numerous roles throughout the Photo League's existence (1936-1951) including educator, administrator, reviewer, editor of Photo Notes and founder of Chelsea Document (1938-1940), an indictment of obsolete buildings and substandard living conditions in a New York neighborhood. He enlisted on March 6, 1943, and served in the Sixth Army in Panama during World War II. Grossman's 1940 photographs of labor union activity led to FBI investigations and the blacklisting of the Photo League as a communist front in 1947. In 1949, he opened a photography school in Provincetown, Massachusetts, although he continued to live and teach in NYC part of every year.

Grossman was married twice: to Marion Hille and then to Miriam Grossman.

Grossman died from a heart attack in 1955. His book, Journey to the Cape, coauthored with Millard Lampell, was published posthumously, in 1959.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023