Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York

Co-produced by Academy-Award nominee Nina Rosenblum and her husband and partner, writer/filmmaker Daniel Allentuck, in association with Mary Engel, Ordinary Miracles: The Photo Leagues New York, narrated by Campbell Scott, is a documentary on the life and times of the Photo League, a legendary organization of amateur and professional photographers that flourished in New York City between 1936 and 1951. For Engel and Rosenblum, the film is an intensely personal undertaking inasmuch as their parents were influential members of the Photo League. Inspired by Lewis Hine and the photographers of the Farm Security Administration and with expert guidance from Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott and Beaumont Newhall, the Photo Leagues collective portrait of urban life during the turbulent years of the thirties and forties is comparable in spirit and quality to the imperishable record of rural America created by the Leagues contemporaries in the Farm Security Administration--scarcely surprising giv