📷📷💰💰 The 15 Million USD Camera 💰💰📷📷

Back again with one of those crazy auction stories I love to share! Usually it's about coins and stuff so this one a bit different.

So, back in 2022 in the "40th Leitz Photographica Auction" a camera from the 1920s sold for 15 fucking million dollars 🤯🤯🤯

That's a really impressive number considering how the auction house estimated a price of 2 million $ with a starting bid of 1.000.000 $.

But what makes this camera so unique to fetch this ridiculous amount of money?

Labeled as "Leica 0-Series No. 105", it was part of a limited series of just 23 prototypes produced to test the market before Leica commenced commercial production in the mid-1920s. Today only a handful of those survive so it's clearly rare.

source

But this particular one is even more special.

It was the one used personally by Oskar Barnack, the inventor of the Ur-Leica and a pioneer of 35mm photography. He used it until sometime in the 1930s and later passed it to his son. It remained in the family and was eventually passed to a collector sometime in the 1960s.

Tldr, a camera with lots of historical significance. Is the price justified?

Doubt it, but rich people gonna rich. It's amazing what people with fuck you money will buy 😂

Fyi, the previous record was also held by a Leica 0-Series camera. That one fetched only about 3 million usd in 2018... Yeah, cheap change 😅

---

---

You can read a bit more on the story here if you like.

Posted Using INLEO