The Film & Photo League (WFPL) was a group of radical amateur filmmakers and photographers, active in the 1930s. Their films offer a unique picture of working class lives, resonating strongly with today’s concerns of food poverty, work precarity and the cost of living crisis.
The Film & Photo League Archive was created in 2019 to preserve rediscovered documents, film and photographs relating to the original group. The aim of the project is to examine the work of the WFPL in the wider context of the interwar Workers Film and Photography movement, identify the legacy of Workers FIlm and Photography in contemporary forms of creative practice and investigate the potential of radical archival collections to allow for the ‘expression, exhibition, documentation and preservation of a sentiment or movement in a particular community’.
The Film and Photo League was re-established as a not-for-profit company in 2019. This was partly done to preserve the larger part of the Film and Photo League’s surviving documents, which were discovered the previous year, and which were publicly thought lost since 1939. The material in the archive collection includes over 600 items of correspondence, crucial documents, flyers and pamphlets, film and photography. This collection forms the foundation of the archive which aims to preserve and promote knowledge and understanding of the British Film and Photo League’s activities.
A further collection of textual material and the majority of the FPL’s film production is held at the British Film Institute. One of the long term objectives of the Film and Photo League is to scan or transcribe all significant documents for public and scholarly access and use online. As part of this process the BFI have made some of the film material available through the BFI player as listed in the filmography section of this website.
Currently the Film and Photo League Archive is seeking funding to further develop the collection, online access and commission new creative work in response to the material within it. This includes the cataloguing, scanning and transcription of the textual material within the archive to provide digital access to its content. This is being done in consultation with the BFI and National Archives.
The Film and Photo League Archive is also committed to expanding its collection through the commission of new creative work made in response to the archive content, donation, acquisition and the collection of oral histories relating to the Film and Photo League.
If you have or know of material that needs preserving or that you think might be of interest please contact the Film and Photo League via the contact page.
