White Angel Breadline, one of Dorothea Lange’s most compelling images, has become a definitive representation of the human toll taken by the Depression. This photograph pre-dates her work for the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), and set the template for the humanistic approach she continued to pursue throughout her career.

In 1933, Lange operated her own portrait studio in San Francisco and catered to an affluent clientele. As she recounted many times, however, she could not ignore the growing number of newly unemployed people in the city, and she took to the street, camera in hand, to explore the situation. One early outing brought her to a breadline operated by a wealthy woman known as the White Angel, who dispensed food to those in need. Lange exposed three negatives there, with her 3 ¼-by-4 ½ Graflex camera, each taken from a slightly different vantage point.

The print offered here is one of the few prints of White Angel Breadline to be personally inscribed by Lange to one of her colleagues in the field. Lange gave this print to the young photographer and filmmaker Phillip Greene, who had assisted her in the darkroom at one time and was the cameraman for the Lange documentary produced by San Francisco’s public television station KQED. In addition to the inscription by Lange on the reverse of the photograph’s mount is a contact print of another image taken with her Graflex at the breadline on that day.