How Can One Artwork Have Four Very Different Price Tags?

Anyone making a tally of the most important fine art photographs of the 20th century would probably include Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1932 image of a man jumping into a puddle; Robert Doisneau’s 1950 photo of two people kissing in front of Paris’s Hôtel de Ville; László Moholy-Nagy’s 1928 shot from the Berlin Radio Tower; and, somewhere near the top of the list, Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, which he took while on a cross-Atlantic trip in 1907.

The image is widely considered one of the world’s first modernist photographs, and Stieglitz did everything he could to further that perception, publishing it alongside a cubist painting by Pablo Picasso. “It’s truly one of the 5 or 10 most important pictures ever made,” says the New York photo dealer Howard Greenberg. “It’s a memorable, timeless image, and it’s very important in photography in terms of its modernism.”