Dorothea Lange

mounted, signed and dated by the photographer in pencil on the mount, numbered and annotated in unidentified hands in pencil and ink and with the photographer's '1163 Euclid Avenue Berkeley California' studio stamp on the reverse, matted, framed, 1933

By descent to John Dixon, the photographer's son

Edwynn Houk Gallery, Chicago, 1988

Acquired by the Quillan Company from the above, 1989

This print:

Jill Quasha, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs (New York, 1991), pl. 48

Constance Sullivan, ed., Women Photographers (New York, 1990), pl. 118

This early print is on double-weight paper with an eggshell surface and slightly warm tonality. The finely-made print sets forth a great deal of detail, showing the texture of the brightly lit stone wall beside the subject, as well as detail in the shadowed area behind. This print is in excellent condition. When the print is viewed closely in raking light, there is a faint 1.5-cm. line of original retouching visible in the upper left corner, as well as faint retouching in the dark area between the man's legs. The photograph is mounted to stiff, thin board with a pinhole in each of the upper corners.
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In the portrayal of despair, few photographers were more eloquent than Dorothea Lange. Her compassionate but unsparing photographs of anonymous individuals caught by circumstance and history are some of the most remembered images of the 1930s and 1940s.  From her White Angel Breadline and Migrant Mother, to the later Bad Trouble over the Weekend and The Defendant, Lange was a master at defining what she once referred to as 'the end of the line.' 

The photograph offered here was made on the San Francisco waterfront during the dockworkers' strike of 1934, a year after Lange had left the safety of her portrait studio and had begun to document the lives of those on the street.  In the early days of the 1930s, millions were unemployed across America, and in San Francisco, Lange saw hundreds who were homeless, hungry, and without prospects.   Although her career as a portrait photographer had depended on her talents with faces, Lange created many of her most emotional and powerful images, such as the one offered here, with no faces at all.  As in White Angel Breadline, it is the down-turned head that conveys the picture's message.

The present early print, signed and dated by Lange on its mount, is likely a print Lange used for one of her first exhibitions. In 1934, at the suggestion of Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke showed a selection of Lange's work in his 983 Brockhurst Street Gallery in Oakland, and it is believed that the print offered here was a part of that exhibition.  Although no catalogue of her works in that show survives, we know that at least one other photograph taken during the strike was featured in this exhibition, a photograph of a man at a microphone.   

In his review of Lange's work in a 1934 issue of Camera Craft, Willard Van Dyke compared her photographs to those of Mathew Brady:  'Both Lange and Brady share the passionate desire to show posterity the mixture of futility and hope, of heroism and stupidity, greatness and banality that are the concomitants of man's struggle forward' (quoted in Photographs of a Lifetime, p. 17).