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Dorothea LangeGeneral Strike, San Francisco;
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Find your local specialistDorothea Lange
Gelatin silver print, mounted, printed before 1940, the photographer's signature and date '1933' in ink on the image, framed.
9 1/2 x 7 1/4in
Footnotes
Provenance:
Gift from the artist to Al Camille, San Francisco; by descent to the present owner
Literature:
Willard Van Dyke, 'The Photographs of Dorothea Lange: A Critical Analysis,' Camera Craft, vol. XLI (October, no. 10,1934), p. 463
Judith Keller, Dorothea Lange, Photographs from The J. Paul Getty Museum, The J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2002, pl. 6, p. 21
Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life, Syracuse University Press, 2000, p. 118
Therese Thau Heyman, Sandra Phillips, and John Szarkowski, Dorothea Lange: American Photographs, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994, pl. 10
Karin Becker Ohru, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London, 1980, pl. 8, p. 39
Al Camille (1904-1981) was the Art Director for the San Francisco advertising agency McCann-Erickson for more than thirty years. He was also a practicing artist and active member of the Bohemian Club. His family in not certain how this photograph came into his possession. There may have been a connection between Camille and Lange's husband, Maynard Dixon, who also belonged to the Bohemian Club and did commercial work for various advertising agencies to supplement his income.
This image, along with White Angel Bread Line, was taken just as Lange was shifting from paid studio portraitures to recording the political and economic repercussions of the Depression. The year 1933 was the worst year of the Depression with fourteen million people out of work. On May Day, 1933, the traditional international day for labor rallies, Lange took her camera out on the street to photograph the demonstration in San Francisco Civic Center. The "pickets and placards dominate her photograph. The slogans speak of the issues the radical movement was pressing: American Workers-Join Hands with the German Workers, Down with German Fascism, Defend the Chinese Soviets..." In the midst of this activity Lange captures this dynamic pose of "a big policeman standing with his back to a line of pickets holding aloft their slogans. His legs wide apart, his head to one side, hands laced together over his belly, the star of authority shining on his chest." (A Photographer's Life, pp. 77-78). A year later this was one of five images Willard Van Dyke included in his Camera Craft article on Lange photographs.