Dorothea Lange valuation

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) was born Dorothea Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey, and grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side. She is known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration, above all Migrant Mother (1936). In 1941 she became the first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for photography, and she gave it up after the attack on Pearl Harbor to take on an assignment documenting the internment of Japanese Americans. She later taught at the California School of Fine Arts. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a retrospective in 1966, which she had helped to curate, its first devoted to a woman photographer.

What comes to market is mostly gelatin silver prints. Prints made during her lifetime are treated very differently from later ones, and her Farm Security Administration negatives are held by the Library of Congress and can be printed by anyone, so copies of Migrant Mother are common. A buyer will want to know when and by whom a print was made and what stamps and inscriptions it carries. The Oakland Museum of California holds her archive. Prints should be checked for silvering, creases and staining from old mounts.