14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since Madonna and Guy Ritchie announced their divorce, it seems as if everything that the singer did has managed to stir up controversy. Either for dating a sportsman, or a model with a questionable past, and even for her alleged controlling ways around the house while still married to Guy, Madonna has been in the headlines a lot these days. However, this time, it’s for something that she did when she was still young that she’s getting all this press.
The Associated Press reports that a picture of a 20-year-old Madonna, described as “full-frontal,” “very explicit” and uncensored, will go on sale on February 12 at Christie’s auction house in New York. Even if the photo has already made the rounds in the media, being available on the Internet as well all this while, it is expected to nab anywhere between $10,000-15,000, it has been reported.
The photograph was shot by Lee Friedlander, who reached out to girls via a newspaper ad looking for models not afraid or shy of taking off their clothes. According to Christie’s, at the time (in 1979), Madonna was a 20-year-old “strapped for cash” dancer, who needed whatever work she could find to make ends meet. She called up Friedlander and agreed to do the shot. Her fee was $25, several media outlets say.
Together with this shot, Friedlander took several others, some of which were later, in 1985, published in Playboy magazine. The photographer sold most of them, but this one, being “maybe the most explicit one,” according to the renowned auction house, will probably sell for more than the others: in 2003, the other pics were auctioned for approximately $7,000.
Despite the fact that Madonna is definitely not a stranger to controversy, which can be proven by her much debated book from her youth years, this time, the auction comes at a very bad timing. For one, her “wild” days are well behind her; secondly, she is now just coming out of a highly mediated divorce and scandal is probably the last thing she needs. These two reasons have prompted some media representatives and celebrity bloggers to speculate that the highest bidder for the uncensored pic would probably be Madonna herself, in an attempt to let this die down slowly.