Kylie Minogue in a noughts-and-crosses dress, Daryl Braithwaite in a rugby kit, Cold Chisel with stockings on their heads — these were some engaging sartorial moments in Australian music history.

Thankfully, they were captured on film. Now, the original photographic prints are for sale, following protracted squabbles over the fate of the Sydney Morning Herald's valuable photo archive.

For years, Fairfax Media had been looking for a cost-effective way to digitise the millions of photos its newspaper snappers had taken over more than a century.

In 2013, Fairfax struck a deal with an Arkansas-based firm, Rogers Photo Archive, to get the job done. But that company was soon wound up after its owner became the subject of an FBI fraud investigation.

Two million photographic prints from the Sydney Morning Herald subsequently fell into the hands of a receiver, who then reached out to Santa Monica art dealer Daniel Miller.

"These are vintage prints, and that's a designation in photography," Mr Miller told RN's The Hub on Art.

Cold Chisel captured by The Sydney Morning Herald in 1978. ( Supplied: Lawsons )

"They are prints that were made just about when the photo was taken.

"The printing process from negatives is kind of an old-school experience ... and the people who are great at it, very few of them [still] exist."

Some of the framed prints for sale. ( Supplied: Lawsons )

He thought many of the prints would end up being sold by individual sellers on eBay, or thrown out. He ended up purchasing the prints — though not the negatives or the copyright, which are still owned by Fairfax — and sorting them into different subject categories.

The 370 prints for sale through auction house Lawsons — the majority about 25cm x 20cm — feature a variety of Australian musicians, from Midnight Oil to The Divinyls, Cold Chisel, Tina Arena, Minogue and Crowded House.

The photos cover five decades of Australian music, with Lawsons putting a low estimate for the entire set of prints at $84,000, "given that they are rare images to begin with, and there is nothing better than the original photograph," Lawsons head of art Adam Thwaites said.

Aside from music, other categories represented among the entire two-million-print collection include theatre, AFL, Indigenous life and specific regional cities.

Miller has "repatriated" about 160,000 of the prints so far, including about 25,000 covering cricket that were sold to the Bradman Museum in Bowral, NSW.

"I had never seen an archive before that was really an intact history of a nation," he said.