How much is the original photo of David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sama”

It was April 1973 and it was lightning, literal and metaphorical: the cover of “Aladdin Sane” became an icon. A David Bowie with his face rigged by a red and blue lightning, with bare torso and closed eyes. To take that photograph, destined to enter the history of pop culture, was Brian Duffy, London photographer of the East End, famous for having portrayed faces of fashion, music and cinema, from John Lennon to Black Sabbath. Duffy disappeared in 2010, but his most famous shot could now establish a new record.

Now, as reported by the Guardian, an original print signed by the famous shot by Brian Duffy – the London photographer who made the cover – was auctioned by the Bonhams gallery, together with 35 more lots from the photographer’s archive. 300,000 pounds could arrive: if it were sold to that figure, it would become one of the most expensive cover photographs ever sold. The artwork of the Led Zeppelin debut album was sold for 325 thousand pounds in 2020: the more figure for a musical cover.

The lot also includes the stool on which Bowie sat down during the shooting, the original Hasselblad 500C camera used by Duffy and a rare contact Sheet with session shots – one of the only two existing specimens. In addition, the original interior of the vinyl is also auctioned: a whole -figure image of Bowie in the role of healthy Aladdin, used as a centerfold for the top 5,000 copies of the disc. For the latter, a auction base is estimated between 150,000 and 200,000 pounds. The sale opens on October 22nd.

The image has gone around the world, also literally: the Duffy Archive lent the original work of “Aladdin Sane” at the Victoria & Albert Museum for the world itinerant exhibition “David Bowie is”, also passed from Italy, to Bologna. In 2023, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the album, photography was also the centerpiece of the exhibition organized at the Southbank Center in London. On that occasion, Chris Duffy – son of the photographer – defined the image “the Mona Lisa del Pop”.

“Aladdin Sae”, a game of words on “A Lad Insane” (“A crazy boy”), was published in 173 after “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” represented the transition from the character of Ziggy to the new incarnation of Bowie. “Aladdin Sane” resisted the time not only for its musical value but for the power of the image on the cover, which became the very symbol of Bowie’s transformism. In 2023, to celebrate the half century from the exit, the album was reprinted in a special version with a new remaster and a slightly updated cover, which reiterated the iconographic centrality of that shot. As we wrote at the time, reviewing the reprint

For some time, and inexplicably, Bowie was never very enthusiastic about the result of ‘Aladdin healthy’. With the passage of the vintages, however, he would have gone to re -evaluate him in full, and then publicly judge him as a job even better than his predecessor (in his own vintage declaration said that it was a progression compared to ‘ziggy’, and that it was a “more updated disk in terms of rock’n’roll”). And if by David Bowie there are at least ten, ultimately, the perfect record chapters in their entirety, there is no doubt that among them there are also dominated ‘Aladdin Sane’. Listen (or listen to) to believe.

That photograph, born as a promotion for a disc, has become a global icon. Now, that same image could also enter history on the collecting market