Lee Miller valuation

Lee Miller (1907–1977) was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, and was a Vogue cover model in New York before she went to Paris in 1929 to learn photography with Man Ray, as his assistant, model and partner. Together they developed the technique of solarisation, the partial reversal of tones that gives her pictures of the period their silvery outlines, and she showed with the Surrealists. She ran her own studio in New York from 1932, lived in Egypt in the later 1930s, and in 1937 met the British Surrealist Roland Penrose, with whom she settled in London. Through the Second World War she photographed for British Vogue, first the Blitz and then, as an accredited war correspondent with the US Army, the liberation of France, Dachau and Buchenwald, and the fall of Germany in 1945. She spent her later years at Farley Farm in Sussex.

Which print you have is the first question. Prints made in her lifetime are rare and are the most valuable. Most of what comes to market was printed later from her negatives by the Lee Miller Archives at Farley Farm, run by her son Antony Penrose: gelatin silver prints made for the estate, for some thirty years by a single printer, Carole Callow, and carrying the Archives' stamp on the back, sometimes in limited editions such as the one issued for her centenary in 2007. These estate prints are a separate and more modest market from the lifetime prints, even where the image is identical. Stamps, edition numbers, paper and any Vogue or agency markings need reading together, and the Archives, which hold her negatives, prints and papers, are the reference for attribution.