"Afghan Girl" by photographer Steve McCurry sold for $147,000 to an anonymous bidder

"Afghan Girl" by photographer Steve McCurry, which graced the cover of National Geographic in 1985, sold for $147,000 to an anonymous bidder at an auction held in New York. Photo: Stan Honda, AFP/Getty Images / SF

Washington --

It is, the auctioneer needlessly reminds his audience, "an iconic image."

So let's buy it.

Twenty-five thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at, but it's quite sneezable at Christie's, for this auction, for this particular photograph. The bids whoosh through the 20s, 30s, 40s, 80s. "I must rush you now," Andrew McVinish gently informs a prospective buyer stuck at the pesky number of $122,000. "There it rests. Now's the time."

Only when the flying numbers surpass $130,000 does McVinish remind everyone: "I did say this was an important photograph."

It is the photograph of photographs of photographs. The ragged red scarf, the scissors-sharp green eyes, the hungry, hunted, haunted beauty. "Afghan Girl," taken by Steve McCurry, appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985, and you saw it and you remembered.

Last week, it was for sale. A lot of it was, which is to say a small portion of it was. Specifically, 232 lots from the National Geographic Society's 11.5 million-image archive were put up for bid in the society's first auction in its 125-year history. The event was held in New York, but it - like everything else now - was live-streamed online for anthropoli-geeks around the globe.

McVinish conducted the proceedings in the dignified manner of a man who could sell very expensive snow to very well-dressed Alaskans, but never once make it feel as if he was nudging.

"It's at 132," he reminds the prospective bidders for the Afghan photograph. But then, suddenly, the photo is at $140,000. The audience gasps. Someone chortles in the back - an apparently involuntary-glee reaction to the mere mention of this kind of money.

But McVinish is not done yet. "One-forty-one?" he entices. "Another? One-forty-five. This might be the last one. Fantastic. Magical. Are you certain? No regrets. Fair warning. Last chance. No regrets. Never to be bid on again. It's going. It's going."

It went, the photo of the Afghan girl, with a "hammer price" of $147,000 - three times more than the photograph had been expected to fetch - to a bidder whose identity remained anonymous.

But it wasn't the biggest-ticket item, not by far. That honor went to "The Duel on the Beach," a painting by Newell Convers Wyeth, which brought $1.1 million. Other items sold included works by Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White and Alfred Eisenstaedt, for money totaling $3.8 million.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/National-Geographic-artwork-auctioned-4102234.php#ixzz2Ek9fZ1nN