Steve McCurry valuation

Steve McCurry was born in Philadelphia in 1950, studied film at Pennsylvania State University and worked for a newspaper before going to India as a freelance in 1978. In 1979 he crossed into Afghanistan in local dress, on the eve of the Soviet invasion, and the film he brought out sewn into his clothes won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal. He went on to work for National Geographic for decades, and in 1984 he photographed a young girl in the Nasir Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar whose green eyes made the magazine's cover in June 1985; the Afghan Girl became one of the best-known photographs ever published, and she was identified as Sharbat Gula in 2002. He joined Magnum in 1986. His work, almost all of it in colour and much of it on Kodachrome, covers Afghanistan, India, Tibet, Myanmar and the Middle East, the monsoon and the Gulf War of 1991.

His prints are sold signed and numbered, and most images were editioned separately at several sizes, so the size and the edition number identify the work as much as the picture does. They are chromogenic prints, in recent years made digitally, and are usually signed on the back. Unsigned prints, posters and book plates are a different and far smaller market. Because these are colour photographs, often large, light damage and fading matter more than with a black-and-white print, and a print that has hung in the sun for years is not worth what a well-kept one is. Gallery invoices and certificates that came with a print are worth keeping with it.