Dorothea Lange’s name is nearly synonymous with the Great Depression, which gave rise to her famously unflinching portrayals of human suffering. But in 1933, she was making her living as a portrait photographer, shooting the social elite in her San Francisco studio. The Depression had begun to take a toll on her business, however, and one idle day as she gazed out her window, Lange was struck by the number of unemployed and homeless men waiting in breadlines and idling on the sidewalks. She decided to go into the streets and photograph what she saw.

Near her apartment was the White Angel soup kitchen, where a crowd of men in hats and worn overcoats had lined up for food. Lange was nervous about photographing the men, worried that she might offend someone or move too slowly and miss a good shot. One of the pictures she took that day, White Angel Breadline, a haunting portrait of a haggard man with a tin cup, cemented her reputation when it was published by U.S. Camera in 1935. “I can only say I knew I was looking at something,” recalled Lange to an interviewer some 30 years later, according to Linda Gordon in Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, 2009. “Sometimes you have an inner sense that you have encompassed the thing.”

And the picture’s importance has endured: In October 2005, a print of White Angel Breadline that Lange signed and gifted to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry in 1936 was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $822,400 (est. $200–300,000), making it the most expensive Lange photograph ever sold. The price reflects not only the significance of the particular image and the centrality of Lange’s Depression-era photographs to her oeuvre, but also the scarcity of her vintage prints—those made no more than a couple of years after a photograph is taken.

“I think the market has come to the realization that her prints are much rarer than once thought,” says New York photography dealer Bruce Silverstein, who has frequently handled sales of her work. He notes that Lange’s death in 1965 preceded both “the print revolution of the 1970s when many of the early artists were going back and reprinting from their negatives” as well as an established market for fine art photography.

As a result, the gap in price between vintage Langes, printed shortly after she shot them, and those she made later, is one of the widest seen anywhere in the photography market. Experts suggest vintage prints of White Angel Breadline will bring anywhere between $300,000 and $800,000, depending on condition and provenance. Prices for later prints, though lower, tend to stay in the five-figure range, according to auction databases. In the same year that Sotheby’s sold the record-setting print, Christie’s sold a White Angel Breadline printed in the 1950s for a hammer price of $32,000 (est. $30–40,000). In short, says Silverstein, collectors and institutions that cannot pay a hefty premium “are willing to accept the fact that a print might not be made at the time of the negative but a little bit later. As long as it was done within her lifetime there seems to be more interest for that work.”

A similar stratification is seen in the prices realized
for Lange’s most famous image, Migrant Mother, her 
haunting 1936 photograph of a destitute California
 farmworker surrounded by her children. In today’s
market, most examples for sale are later prints, made 
in the 1950s or ’60s. Christie’s sold one for $35,000 
(est. $10,000–15,000) this past spring, and San Francisco 
dealer Scott Nichols had one in his recent exhibition “Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Journey” that was printed in the 1950s and whose price he expected to be “somewhere around $75,000.” On October 30, Bonhams will offer a print of Migrant Mother in its photography sale that was “probably printed mid-1950s,” according to the catalogue description, and carries an estimate of $30,000 to $50,000.

In contrast, “the last significant print of Migrant Mother to come up was in 1998,” says Denise Bethel, head of the photographs department at Sotheby’s, “and we got a quarter-million dollars for that.” The photo—which Bethel describes as “unbelievable,” an extremely high-quality early print with handwritten notes and Lange’s signature—was snagged by the deep-pocketed Getty Museum. “If one were to come up now,” says Bethel, “if it were the right print, it could easily bring half a million dollars, maybe a million dollars.”