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The original image for David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album could become the most expensive album artwork ever sold when it goes under the hammer with an estimate of £300,000.
The famous picture of Bowie with a lightning bolt across his face could beat the record set by Led Zeppelin’s debut album artwork, which sold for $325,000 in 2020.
Shot by Brian Duffy – one of the “terrible trio” along with David Bailey and Terence Donovan who captured London as a cultural capital in the 1960s – it has become one of rock’s most famous images, and is part of 35 items from the Duffy archive being sold by Bonhams.
The lot includes the stool Bowie sat on for the 1973 Aladdin Sane shoot, the original Hasselblad 500C camera used by Duffy and a contact sheet from the shoot, which is one of only two in existence.
The original inside artwork – a full-length image of Bowie as Aladdin Sane that was a centrefold for the first 5,000 records sold – is also on the auction block with an estimate of £150,000 to £200,000.
Claire Tole-Moir, Bonhams’ head of popular culture, said when most people thought of Bowie it was Duffy’s image that flashed in their mind’s eye, and because of its status the original artwork could set a new benchmark.
She said: “The only other artworks at this sort of significance were the original artwork by George Hardie for Led Zeppelin’s debut album and Elton John’s Captain Fantastic, which made $212,500. So it’s right up there.”
In thepast decade Duffy’s image of Bowie has been seen by thousands of people around the world. The Duffy archive loaned the Aladdin Sane artwork to the V&A for its world-touring David Bowie Is exhibition.
The V&A’s exhibition was the museum’s most visited international touring show in its 165-year history. About 312,000 visitors saw it in London before it travelled to Toronto, São Paulo, Berlin, Chicago, Paris, Melbourne, Groningen in the Netherlands, Bologna, Tokyo, Barcelona and New York. Last week, the V&A East Storehouse in London opened a new Bowie archive.
The photograph was also the centrepiece of the Southbank Centre’s exhibition to mark the 50th anniversary of Aladdin Sane in 2023, with Duffy’s son, Chris, calling the image “the Mona Lisa of pop”.
Chris Duffy told the Guardian that the famous flash across Bowie’s eyelid was originally a tiny emblem on his cheekbone before his father stepped in, “grabbed some lipstick to draw an outline of a much bigger flash … and Aladdin Sane was born”.
It was not only Duffy’s innovation that brought the image to life. The Stanley Kubrick collaborator Philip Castle, who worked on the A Clockwork Orange posters, airbrushed Duffy’s photograph, adding the watermark on Bowie’s shoulder and touching up his eyelashes.
“It’s a dye transfer print, which is basically one of the highest-quality types of prints that you can do,” said Tole-Moir. “And at the time of its creation in 1973, it was the most expensive process that was really, really costly. So to have created it at that time was already a privilege.”
Duffy had a long working relationship with Bowie, and also shot album artwork for Lodger and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) albums.
The sale will open on 22 October.
