Photograph valuation
What a photographic print is likely to make, and whether it is a vintage print or a later one. Valued from photographs, at no charge.
Photography is the category where the date of the object and the date of the image are different questions, and where the answer is worth the most. Two prints of the same famous negative — one made at the time, one made thirty years later from the same negative by the same photographer — are not close in value. Almost everything else in this market follows from that distinction.
What moves the value
Vintage, or printed later
A vintage print is one made at or near the time the negative was taken. A later print is made from the same negative afterwards, sometimes decades afterwards, sometimes posthumously by an estate. All three are legitimate and all three are catalogued differently. The evidence is in the paper, the process and what is written on the back.
Process
Gelatin silver, platinum, C-type, dye transfer, pigment and the rest each behave differently in the market and age differently on the wall. Process also dates a print: a paper that was not manufactured until a given decade settles an argument about when a print was made, whatever the image shows.
Edition, estate stamps and annotations
Contemporary photography is editioned and the edition is usually stated on the verso, alongside the photographer's signature or an estate stamp where the work was printed after their death. Annotations, negative numbers and printer's notes on the back are ordinary working marks and they are frequently the best evidence a print carries.
Silvering, fading and surface
Photographic prints have their own condition vocabulary. Mirroring or silvering in the dark areas, fading in colour processes that were never stable, retouching, and surface abrasion from handling without gloves all read through to the estimate, and they are judged against what that process normally looks like at that age.
What to photograph
The image, and then the whole of the verso — that is where the signature, the edition, the stamps and the annotations live, and a photograph of the front alone rarely settles anything. If the print is framed, say so rather than unframing it.
What it costs
Nothing, and there is no obligation to sell afterwards. Most of what we are asked to look at we will never sell — people want to know what they have, and that is a perfectly good reason to ask. If a work is not worth the cost of handling it properly, we will say so at the photograph stage, before anyone has spent anything.
How a valuation is arrived at sets out the method across every medium, and where to sell paintings in the UK compares the routes once you know what you have. When you are ready, send the photographs.