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DOROTHEA LANGE (1895-1965)
The General Strike, Policeman.
Silver print, 9
1
/
2
x7
1
/
2
inches (24.1x19.1 cm.), double mounted, with
Lange’s Euclid Avenue hand stamp, on the secondary mount verso. 1934
[40,000/60,000]
Acquired from the family of the artist by the Houk-Friedman Gallery, NewYork, NewYork; to a
Private Collector.
Dorothea Lange’s early days as a documentary photographer coincided with the beginning of what
would become the Great Depression. She opened a portrait studio, in Oakland, California, and
recalled later seeing men wandering below her studio window, adrift and aimless. In response, she
took her camera outside too. Her impulse to make images, to document the unemployed, the
desperate, the affected, would never diminish.
The 1934 General Strike in San Francisco depicted here was not the first protest Lange photographed,
but she made these images (and hung them in her studio) not quite knowing how or for what the
images might be used. Soon, though, her photographs would begin to appear in print, first in
Survey
Graphic
, the social welfare journal Paul Taylor, her second husband, worked for. Soon after, she would
also be associated with the California Emergency Relief Administration and the Farm Security
Administration. Lange’s methods—open, instinctual, responsive, and intimate—created some of the
most enduring and iconic images from the period. “Open yourself as wide as you can, like a piece
of unexposed, sensitized material,” she wrote. In turn, her photographs opened up the viewer, and
still today they resonate.
This powerful photograph of a police officer reflects the social and political unease of the period.
The officer appears relaxed, but his watchful authority (perhaps exemplified by his gleaming badge
and partially obscured stern profile) lends a sense of tension to what is otherwise a street portrait of
working men engaged in what seems to be quiet, crowded protest. The bold placards reflect bold
slogans as well as the community’s diverse ethnicity.
Aperture,
Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime
, p. 47; Borhan,
Dorothea Lange:The Heart and Mind
of a Photographer
, p. 79 (there titled
Street Demonstration, Chinatown, San Francisco, California
); Davis,
The Photographs of Dorothea Lange
, p. 23 (there titled and dated
Street Demonstration, San Francisco
,
1933); Heyman, Phillips and Szarkowski,
Dorothea Lange:American Photographs
, pl. 10; Keller,
Dorothea
Lange, Photographs fromThe J. Paul Getty Museum
, pl. 6;Van Dyke,
The Photographs of Dorothea Lange:
A Critical Analysis
, p. 463; Meltzer,
Dorothea Lange:A Photographer’s Life
, p. 116; Ohru,
Dorothea Lange
and the Documentary Tradition
, np; Partridge,
Restless Spirit:The Life andWork of Dorothea Lange
, p. 45.