When the Prince photo came on the block, two pre-bidders had already entered tie bids of $1 million. A third bidder at the auction raised the price to $1.1 million, where it sold. Figuring in the premium, the final price of $1,248,000 exceeded Christie's high estimate of $1.2 million.

While technically a photograph, the Prince work is better described as a re-photograph. Created in 1989, the piece is one in a series of photos Prince took of portions of Marlboro cigarette ads. Price began photographing advertisements torn from magazines while working as a press clips collator at Time Life in the 1970s. This particular print is one of two other than the artist's proof; the other is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Christie's declined to provide the names of the buyer and the seller, saying the image was put up for auction by an anonymous consignor. PDN was unable to identify the buyer, a man who was present in the audience last night.

The previous record price for an individual photo sold at auction was $922,488, set May 20, 2003 at Christie's in London, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. It was a daguerreotype of the Athenian Temple on the Acropolis in Greece, taken in 1842 by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, a French traveler, artist and historian.

The previous record for the sale of a 20th-century photograph was set and then tied just last month at Sotheby's in New York. Dorothea Lange's "White Angel Bread Line" sold for $822,400 on Oct. 11, tying Edward Weston's "The Breast," sold Oct. 10, according to Sotheby's web site.

Outside of auctions, it is impossible to know which photo might have been the most expensive in the murky world of private art dealing. In 2000, the Man Ray photo "Glass Tears" sold for a price widely thought to be $1.25 million, according to Alex Novak, a photo art dealer who edits the E-Photo Newsletter.

That photo was privately sold by dealer Peter MacGill to San Francisco collector John A. Pritzker. MacGill, incidentally, also purchased the record-tying Lange photo at Sotheby's last month, according to Novak.

Novak says there may be one or two other photographs that have sold privately for more than a million dollars.

On the subject of Prince's cowboy photograph, Novak says it's a shame the work attracted such a high price, given that it is essentially a copy of another photograph.

"I think it's absolute absurdity for people to pay that kind of money for it," he says.

Asked by e-mail for his reaction to the record-setting sale of his picture, Prince wrote back: "When it happened last nite [sic] I was at home wrestling with my eight year old daughter in our bed watching the World Series of Poker, eating the last of our Halloween candy and drinking hot chocalate [sic]."