Original 'Disaster Girl' Photo Sells for over $470K

April 30, 2021
The photo of a girl smiling as a house burns behind her that has sparked numerous memes sold as a non-fungible token with a cryptocurrency price tag of 180 Ethereum.

The original photo behind the famous “Disaster Girl” meme sold for nearly half a million dollars.

The four-year-old pictured in the photo—now age 21—has banked on its notoriety, racking in a total cryptocurrency price tag of 180 Ethereum (or $473,000).

The New York Post reports how Zoe Roth and her father converted the “Disaster Girl” photo—which features Roth ominously smiling outside of a burning building as a young child—into a non-fungible token (NFT). This means that now, every time it’s sold, the both of them can reap 10 percent of the profits.

“Being able to sell it just shows us that we do have some sort of control, some sort of agency in the whole process,” said Roth to the Post.

Gizmodo further delves into the history of the “Disaster Girl” photo, explaining how the blaze in the background was actually a controlled fire meant to clear land. The Roth family was living in the area at the time, with Roth’s father snapping the now-iconic photo as they went to check out the flames.

Now “Disaster Girl” stands as a symbol for any type of devilish good fun that, more often than not, ends in some form of destruction.

Or more succinctly put by a definition on Know Your Meme: “‘Disaster Girl’ is a photoshop meme in which an exploitable photo of a smiling girl is superimposed on to images of natural disasters and accidents to imply that she has caused some type of calamity depicted in the background.”

Such examples of “Disaster Girl’s” use include the sinking of the Titanic and nuclear explosions.

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