Lester Balog

Who was Lester Balog?

Lester Balog was a labor activist and founding member of the Workers' Film & Photo League.

Born in Hungary, 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 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.