Lester Balog (April 18, 1905 – February 1976) was a labor

activist Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range fro ...

and founding member of the Workers' Film & Photo League. Born in

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...

, he immigrated to the United States in the early 1920s. A soccer player in Budapest, after immigrating to the U.S. with his family as a teen, he joined the Labor Sports Union in New York. From there, he got involved with other Workers' organizations. In 1925, after mainstream media photographers were beaten during the Passaic Textile Strike in Passaic, New Jersey, he took up a camera to document the strike and the brutality of police toward the strikers. He became a "worker filmmaker" who helped to make the film, Passaic Textile Strike, one of the earliest surviving films about workers' struggles in the United States. In 1926, at the age of 21, and one year from an engineering degree, Balog left Cooper Union in New York City to join the workers' movement. He designed banners and posters for political events, and continued to photograph and document the struggles of his era. He became a projectionist and showed "workers' films" to groups in theatres, union halls, community centers and other alternative settings. In 1930, he and others in New York City took the name Film & Photo League. In 1933, he left New York on a cross country film tour, showing Workers' Newsreels and the Soviet film "Mother" in over fifty cities. In San Francisco, he was active with the Film and Photo League there, and continued to project films at leftist events in California. He contributed to the only extant film of the San Francisco Film and Photo League, "Century of Progress," (1934) which he donated to The Walter P. Reuther Library of Wayne State University in the 1970s. The film featured footage of the 1933 Cotton Strike in Tulare County. Balog also donated other films portraying farm workers from the 1930s and 1960s, as well as a film he produced as a member of the "Miscellaneous Workers Union" portraying a Labor Day parade and actions in San Francisco, 1941. In 1934, he was arrested in Tulare County, CA and jailed for showing films without a permit of the previous year's strikes to a group of farmworkers. From 1942–1945, he served in the Army. In the late 1940s, he was a photographer for the

ILWU The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) is a labor union which primarily represents dock workers on the West Coast of the United States, Hawaii, and in British Columbia, Canada. The union was established in 1937 after the 1934 West ...

. In the 1950s, he moved to

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with his wife and children, and ran a movie theater there. He moved to the Los Angeles area in the 1960s, and became an active member of the

UAW The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, better known as the United Auto Workers (UAW), is an American Labor unions in the United States, labor union that represents workers in the Un ...

. He continued to screen films throughout his life to activist audiences. One of the famous photographs of

Woody Guthrie Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (; July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) was an American singer-songwriter, one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism. He has inspired ...

was taken by Balog around 1941, showing Guthrie holding a guitar that says "This Machine Kills Fascists." The photograph was used on the cover of the Woody Archives 2009 release "My Dusty Road."

References

*Campbell, Russell. Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930–1942. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982 *Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documentary Film From 1931 to 1942. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981 *Balog, Leslie "Lester Balog," in Left Curve/7, 1978 *Seltzer, Leo. "Documenting the Depression of the 1930s: The Work of the Film and Photo League" in Platt, David, ed. Celluloid Power: Social Film Criticism from the "Birth of a Nation" to "Judgment at Nuremberg" Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press: 1992 *Leshne, Carla. The Film & Photo League of San Francisco, Film History: An International Journal - Volume 18, Number 4, 2006, pp. 361–373
Leshne, Carla. Lost Histories of Work: Lester Balog and the Film and Photo League, OtherZine, Issue 27, Fall 2014.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Balog, Lester 1905 births 1976 deaths American documentary filmmakers American photojournalists Hungarian emigrants to the United States Social documentary photographers