The album cover was one of 35 lots to hit the block from the archives of Duffy, a fashion and portrait photographer who along with David Bailey and Terence Donovan captured London’s cultural scene of the 1960s and ’70s. The only two contact sheets of Bowie for Aladdin Sane sold for £19,200 ($25,000) and the stool that he sat on for the shoot sold for £2,816 ($3,680). Duffy died in 2010 and his son has since run the Duffy Archive, which provided all the items in the sale.
It’s one of the most iconic album covers of all time, and now David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane could set a record for the most expensive album artwork ever sold as the Independent reports.
Showing the late artist with a lightning bolt across his face, the original image could beat the record set by Led Zeppelin’s debut album artwork, which sold for $325,000 (£240,500) in 2020.
The lot also includes the original Hasselblad 500C camera Duffy used, the only two surviving contact sheets for Aladdin Sane, and the stool that Bowie sat on during the Aladdin Sane shoot in 1973.
Duffy, who died in 2010 from lung disease, was one of the “terrible trio” – along with rivals David Bailey and Terence Donovan – who helped to capture the spirit of London in the Swinging Sixties.
Duffy’s image of Bowie has been seen by thousands of people around the world over the past decade, after the artwork was loaned to the Victoria & Albert Museum for its globe-trotting “David Bowie Is” exhibition.
“Duffy asked David what the album was to be called, and David replied, A Lad Insane, he recalled. “Duffy interpreted this as Aladdin Sane; I guess a genie vision and thoughts of rubbing an Aladdin’s lamp must have appeared to him.”
