
Hannah Shapiro
Cataloguer & Sale Coordinator
This auction has ended. View lot details



Sold for US$2,176 inc. premium
Our Photographs specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialist
Cataloguer & Sale Coordinator

Head of Department

Specialist, Head of Sale
Provenance
Acquired directly from the photographer's descendants by the present owner
Literature
Paul S. Taylor and Norman Leon Gold, 'San Francisco and the General Strike', Survey Graphic, vol. XXIII, no. 9, September 1934, p. 404
Jan Goggins, California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and the Making of a New Deal Narrative (Berkeley, 2010), p. 98
Note
Dorothea Lange's Labor Rally Speaker, taken in San Francisco in 1934, captures a pivotal moment during the height of the Great Depression's labor struggles. The image features Alfred A. Girard, a labor movement activist, whose fervor and passion convey the tension and unrest associated with the West Coast longshoremen's strike. The image was later selected by Paul S. Taylor (Lange's future husband) for reproduction in the September issue of Survey Graphic, where it appeared above the caption, "Workers, Unite!" as a visual testament to the labor movement's fight for justice and better working conditions.
"Survey Graphic wrote and asked me for some of those photographs of the May Day communist demonstrations to accompany an article, and I sent them two or three. They printed one, full-page, with their own caption underneath," Lange later reflected. "It wasn't my caption and it, of course, gave the picture a turn which a good documentary photographer is very punctilious about." [Dorothea Lange, quoted in Dorothea Lange: The Making of a Documentary Photographer, an oral history interview conducted by Suzanne Riess in 1960-61 (Berkeley, 1968, p. 154)]