“Where do We Go from Here?’: The Photo League and Its Legacy (1936–2006)” is exactly the sort of photographic exhibition we should hope for from the New York Public Library. The exhibition of almost 100 pictures, drawn from the 400,000 items in the Library’s photographic collection, presents a coherent overview of the Photo League, an institution of significant importance to the history of 20th-century American photography. And it was a New York phenomenon, started in the midst of the Great Depression by the children of immigrants — mostly Jewish — who had limited financial resources, but great New York ambitions. The ambitions were artistic and political, although not above the necessity of making a living.

The Photo League came into being as a separate entity in 1936, when the Film and Photo League split between its two components. The Film and Photo League, in turn, was an offshoot of the Workers International Relief, an organization that supplied the left-wing press with images of working-class life. The political orientation of all these groups was not just left, or even Marxist but, at least in the case of several individuals associated with them, Communist. In December 1947, the attorney general, Tom Clark, included the Photo League on his list of subversive organizations. In April 1949, Angela Calomiris, an FBI informant, testified at the conspiracy trial of 11 Communist Party officials that the Photo League was a Communist front organization. The League disbanded in the late summer of 1951.

We now know, from the opening of the secret archives of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and of the other Communist bloc European countries, that the fear of subversion was not delusional. But we also know that some American government agencies charged with protecting America frequently were inept, and that there were politicians who demagogued the issue. That the members of the Photo League and those linked with it were sympathetic to left-liberal causes is not in dispute: What is murky is the extent to which the league was an actual Communist front organization. There seems to be little or no substantive evidence that it was in any formal sense, but there is reliable anecdotal evidence of recruitment to the party by officers and members. How great a threat this posed to the security of the nation is beyond the scope of this review, but I expect the republic has faced greater dangers.

The library rehearses the league’s politics in terms of civil rights and freedom of speech issues, and then moves on to celebrate the photographic work done by people who were members, who taught, who lectured, who exhibited, and who learned there. This is an honor roll of mid-century greats: Lewis Hine, Beaumont Newhall, Edward Weston, Sid Grossman, Helen Levitt, Weegee, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Ruth Orkin, Aaron Siskind, Paul Strand, Walter Rosenblum, and on and on. About 1,500 students learned about photography through league courses. Many of them made careers in photography, and several were distinguished careers. The league’s journal, Photo Notes, was an important forum for information and discussion. There was a darkroom members could use. And the kibitzing was heady.

The first picture in the exhibition, appropriately enough, is “Morris Huberland, Elizabeth Timberman and Ed Schwartz Judging a Photo League Photo Hunt” (August 2, 1947) taken by George Gilbert. Huberland is holding a roll of 120 film up to the light. The demeanor of the judges is serious, but sociable. One of the next pictures is Ralph Steiner’s 1922 untitled image of a butcher shop Christmas display. All we see is “Merry Xmas” painted in festive script on the window and signs for corned beef 10¢ and pork 25¢.An abiding interest in the mundane, the quotidian, was a hallmark of the Photo League. There are no fashion photographs in the exhibition, and the most important element in the only landscape, David Vestal’s “Monument Valley, UT” (1969), is the road that runs through it.

The Photo League, particularly early on, was devoted to documentary photography — using a camera to compile a dossier on social conditions. The great inspiration was Lewis Hine, who exhibited and lectured at the league, and who left his archives to the league when he died in 1940. There are a dozen wonderful pictures by Hine on display including “Old time craftsman printer using the old type of foot press, New York City” (ca. 1905), of a strikingly handsome man with a shock of white hair and a white beard; “Sweat Shop” (ca. 1915), and “Empire State Building Construction” (1931). Each acknowledges the dignity of work.

Sid Grossman, probably the indispensable man in the formation and early years of the league, is represented by two pictures, including “Chelsea,” from the Documentary Group’s “Chelsea Document” (1938). Looking down over a tar rooftop we see a solitary man walking along the street past run-down industrial buildings: The man is small, and the dilapidation general. Aaron Siskind, another important figure in the early years, is also represented by two pictures, “Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, 14 and 477” (1954), images of young male divers isolated in space. Grossman and Siskind were both gifted teachers, but differed in pedagogy, aesthetics, temperament, and politics.

Lisette Model lectured at the Photo League, and I wonder if her well-known pictures of louche characters sleeping in wicker chairs on the promenade in Nice, France, were an influence on Ann Zane Shanks’s “People sleeping in deck chairs. Green Park, London”(1960s),one of the few color works in the exhibition. The social class is different, the woman and two men are not “beautiful people,” there is a Morris Minor in the background, not a palm tree, but the impulse to take advantage of folks zonked in the sun is the same. Decades after the Photo League went out of existence, those who had been associated with it testified to its continuing impact on their work.

A few years ago I heard Arthur Leipzig talk at the opening of a retrospective exhibition of his work. Leipzig had a long career as a photojournalist and teacher, and his book “Growing Up in New York,” with its pictures of youngsters playing stickball in the street, is a classic invocation of the city in the 1940s and ’50s. When he was a young man, an industrial accident left him unable to do manual labor, so he answered a Photo League ad that promised to teach how to be a photographer. The program cost $6, but he was lucky: He had $6.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until February 18 (Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, 212-930-0800).