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Dorothea Lange (1895-1965); Labor Rally Speaker (Civic Center, San Francisco); image 1
Dorothea Lange (1895-1965); Labor Rally Speaker (Civic Center, San Francisco); image 2
Dorothea Lange (1895-1965); Labor Rally Speaker (Civic Center, San Francisco); image 3
Lot 165

Dorothea Lange
(1895-1965)
Labor Rally Speaker (Civic Center, San Francisco)

1 – 10 October 2025, 12:00 EDT
Online, New York

Sold for US$2,176 inc. premium

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Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)

Labor Rally Speaker (Civic Center, San Francisco), 1934
Gelatin silver print, printed before 1965; the photographer's '1163 Euclid Avenue, Berkeley, California' stamp on the reverse.
9 1/2 x 7 in. (24.1 x 17.8 cm.)
sheet 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm.)

Footnotes

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)]

Additional information

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