On Oct. 11 in New York City, Sotheby’s auction house will open bidding on Tankersley’s suite of 30 vintage, unretouched Lange photographs at its annual fall auction. The pre-bid estimate for the lot: $50,000 to $70,000
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Dorothea Lange is one of the most important photographers of the 20th century,” said Christopher Mahoney, a vice president in Sotheby’s photography department who flew to San Francisco in June to see the pictures. “Her work operates on a couple of levels. The photos are documents of a difficult time in American history. But also, in a lot of instances, they transcend their own time and place and speak universally of the human condition.

I was pretty astonished to see the size of the group and the selection of images,” Mahoney continued. “It’s rare to find a group this big of these Depression-era images by one photographer. It’s quite exciting.”
The photographs, all mounted on weathered white cardboard and annotated either in Lange’s hand or with a typewriter, are from approximately the same time, 1936-38. They feature different migrant families who had come to California from the Midwest to escape both the Depression and a devastating drought that had just about killed their farms.

Posted: 09|27|05 at 9:11 am. Filed under: US News.