Check this list of prized photographs It's really amazing that some are willing to pay so much for probably what many of us would call so little. I am especially amused and bewildered by the one of the cowboy. It is grainy because it was a photograph of an advertisement. How did that not fall under some type of copyright infringement?
Meh, those aren't expensive. This photo: {} Cost $490 million. There's a second one taken an hour later, also $490 million. Now that's expensive! (Mars Observer, cost $980 million and only took two pictures of Mars from a distance before failing) Anyway, art valuations - photography or not - have nothing to do with the quality of the work.
I bet if an Ansel Adams printed original of "Moonrise, Hernandez , New Mexico" in top-notch condition were to come up for sale nowadays, it would make that list - despite the fact that he personally made over 1300 prints of that negative.
This came up somewhere else before (DP review?). I thought the comments were more interesting than the photos. What do I know.
