Dorothea Lange

“workers unite!” SAn Francisco, 1934.

Beginning in 1933, Dorothea Lange periodically ventured out from her San Francisco portrait studio onto the streets to document those unemployed and displaced by the Great Depression. In early May of 1934, West Coast longshoremen walked off the job, starting a strike that eventually included sailors. After demonstrations turned violent in San Francisco that summer, resulting in the police shooting deaths of two men, a General Strike involving around 150,00 workers shut down the city for four days.

Lange’s photographs from this period were exhibited at photographer Willard Van Dyke’s 683 Brockhurst, Oakland gallery during the summer of 1934, marking the first public exhibition of Lange’s new documentary work. Paul Taylor, a University of California economist then focusing on migratory labor, saw Lange’s photographs at Van Dyke’s gallery and contacted her about using her photograph of a speaker at a microphone, to illustrate an article he had written about the San Francisco General Strike. The article, with a full-page reproduction of Lange’s image, was published in Survey Graphic in September 1934, captioned, Workers Unite!. This marked the beginning of a lifetime professional and personal collaboration with Taylor, who she also married in in late 1935.

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