Someone Paid $1M for Photo of a Potato

Some of us send unfortunate texts after a few glasses of wine. Some European businessmen instead spend $1.08 million on a photo of a potato. "Potato #345" from celebrity photographer Kevin Abosch is just that: a portrait of an organic Irish potato against a black background. But a businessman who spotted the image at Abosch's Paris home last year was apparently transfixed. "We had two glasses of wine and he said, 'I really like that,'" Abosch tells the Sunday Times, per the BBC. "Two more glasses of wine and he said, 'I really want that.' We set the price two weeks later." The deal, which is only now being reported, was the biggest of Abosch's career, CNN reports. If the price is confirmed, "Potato #345" would be the 15th most expensive photo ever sold.

And the 64-inch square photo, snapped in 2010, isn't even the only one out there, per Mashable. Another copy of "Potato #345" was sold earlier and a third was donated to a museum in Serbia. What's so great about this dirty potato? The 46-year-old Irishman says it was simply delivered to him along with other organic vegetables. "Generally, the life of a harvested potato is violent and taken for granted. I use the potato as a proxy for the ontological study of the human experience," says Abosch, who's also photographed Johnny Depp, Steven Spielberg, and Malala Yousafzai. "I see commonalities between humans and potatoes that speak to our relationship as individuals within a collective species." (This photo might be the priciest in history.)