The World’s Most Expensive Photos

It’s amazing to think that one of the most expensive photographs ever sold should be of the inside of an ultra-cheapo 99c store, but life’s funny like that.

Andreas Gursky’s “99 cent II Diptychon” sold for the not-insignificant sum of $3,346,456 at Sotheby’s in London back in February 2007. A second print sold for $2.5 million, while a third fetched $2.48 million in 2006 – making them the third-and-fourth most expensive photos ever sold. Gursky, a native of Germany, is famous for taking large-scale pictures of architecture, usually from a high vantage point, using cranes or helicopters. He makes no bones about digitally manipulating shots to give multiple views of the same object, splicing it all together to form an overall impression of what one critic has called “context without context.”

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The gift that stopped giving – the “Women Empowering Women” pyramid scheme

When a scheme called “Women Empowering Women” (“WEW”), promising a £24,000 return on a “gift” of £3,000 surfaced on the UK’s Isle of Wight in 2001, it quickly became the talk of the town. A women-only venture, recruits were required, in addition to their £3,000 gift, to each bring in two further members, who would then bring in two more and so on in an ever-increasing pyramid. With free money on offer, the heady concept of girl power rapidly shunted brain power out of the equation as women around Britain signed up for a slice of the action. They weren’t the only ones: the scheme, which began life in America, was blazing a trail around the world.

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