Buzz Aldrin's 1966 space selfie sells for $9,200
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin's groundbreaking selfie taken during a spacewalk goes up for auction and blows away its estimated minimum, by ten times.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin is still the king of all selfies. He took a self-portrait during the Gemini 12 mission in 1966 with the blue curve of the Earth behind him. A vintage print of that extravehicular space selfie sold for around $9,200 at an auction conducted by auction house Dreweatts & Bloomsbury in London.
Aldrin's photo predates the current selfie craze by decades. He hasn't been shy about staking his claim to selfie history. In a Twitter post sharing the photo in July 2014, he referred to the image as the "best selfie ever." The auction photo is an 8x10 chromogenic print on fiber-based Kodak paper.
Originally expected to sell for a minimum of around $920 (£600, AU$1,190), the print ended up fetching about ten times that: around $9,200 (£6,000, AU$11,870).
The selfie was part of a large selection of vintage space-related NASA photos sold during the auction on Thursday. It included portraits of astronauts, images from the first US spacewalk in 1965 and the first photograph from space.
An automatic camera fitted to a rocket captured the first photo from space in 1946. The bidding for that photo came in at $2,150, quite a distance from what Aldrin's first space selfie netted. That's the selfie craze for you.
(Via Luxury Launches)