Getty Museum

Street Meeting, San Francisco / "Here Democracy Survives" / "What's Ahead?"

Date

1934

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> After returning from a seven-month sojourn in New Mexico, Dorothea Lange observed from her studio the increasing number of unemployed workers in the streets of San Francisco. She took her camera outdoors and began to make pictures of groups of men at soup kitchens, May Day demonstrations, and strike rallies. The photographer Willard Van Dyke recognized the quality of this output and arranged a show of the images at his studio gallery. He also wrote a critique of Lange's work of the October 1834 issue of *Camera Craft* that was illustrated with five of her photographs, including a substantially cropped version of *White Angel Breadline* ([2000.43.1](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/137660)) and *General Strike/Street Meeting, San Francisco* ([2001.86](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/144516))*.* He explained Lange's motivation for tracking the "drama of human relations": "In an old Ford she drives to a place most likely to yield subjects consistent with her general sympathies. Unlike the newspaper reporter, she has no news or editorial policies to direct her movements; it is only her deeply personal sympathies for the unfortunate, the downtrodden, the misfits, among her contemporaries that provide the impetus for her expedition." > > Although Lange's subject was the masses, she usually picked out one figure or face to delineate clearly, someone who would represent the crowd, a person the viewer could care about. This compositional technique was employed by contemporary muralists, many of them imitating the Mexican model. Lange became skilled at photographing groups so that the scale of background figures appeared uniform and the room between them seemed compressed. Against this flat, shallow space, the individual she chose to distinguish from the multitude was easily detected and his or her magnetic features recognized. Lange's sensitive treatment of the worker and her title *Here Democracy Survives* confirm her liberal view of the volatile situation that existed between labor and capital in San Francisco. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 18. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.

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