Disaster Girl Sells for $473,000

2021

Date: April 2021 · Place: Foundation NFT marketplace · the photo: Mebane, North Carolina, January 2005 · Figures: Zoe Roth, 21 (the girl in the photo, then 4 years old) · Dave Roth, her father, who took the photo · the unnamed buyer (3F Music, a Dubai studio) · Tags: NFT, Meme as Asset 01. The Photo Becomes A Meme Dave Roth, an amateur photographer in Mebane, North Carolina, takes his 4-year-old daughter Zoe to a controlled house fire across the street in January 2005. He gets her to turn around and look at the camera. The resulting photo (Zoe smirking slightly, with a burning house behind her) wins a Hooked on the Look photo contest in 2007 and gets used as a JPMorgan Chase ad. By 2008 it is everywhere on the web as Disaster Girl, captioned to make Zoe look responsible for the disaster behind her. Zoe spends her childhood as the most-shared little arsonist on the internet. She enrolls at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2018 and majors in peace and conflict studies. 02. The NFT Sale In April 2021, at the peak of the NFT bubble, Zoe (now 21) mints the original photo as a 1-of-1 NFT on the Foundation marketplace. It sells for 180 ETH, equivalent at the time to approximately $473,000. The buyer is a Dubai-based music studio (3F Music) that had been collecting iconic-meme NFTs (they also buy the Overly Attached Girlfriend NFT and the Nyan Cat NFT around the same time). Zoe retains the copyright. The sale is the formal moment when iconic memes become tradable financial assets. By the end of 2022, the NFT market for meme-image rights has collapsed. The Disaster Girl sale price is a high-water mark that no comparable transaction will reach again. The girl who appeared in a famous photograph as a 4-year-old paid for college with the moment she does not actually remember. Sources • Cady Lang interview with Zoe Roth, TIME (April 2021) • Foundation marketplace sale record, NFT #X (April 2021) • Wikipedia, Disaster Girl