San Francisco Waterfront Strike 1934

Herman Volz made this print, San Francisco Waterfront Strike, using black ink on paper. You can really feel the labor here, can't you? The high contrast, the hard angles and decisive dark lines, it all gives the impression of the artist carving his way through the woodblock to create this image. He must have stood there, intensely focused, carefully gouging the surface with each cut carrying the full weight of the story he wanted to tell. I imagine Volz thinking about the impact of that 1934 strike, the pain and the determination of the workers. He’s capturing a moment of intense drama but there is so much more in the scene. The use of light and shadow shapes our experience. There is so much contrast here, which lends a sense of theatricality to the scene, doesn't it? Almost like the starkness of a stage set. It reminds me a little of what Kathe Kollwitz was doing in Germany around the same time - that same graphic sensibility, the interest in using black and white to tell a human story...