He paid just $2 for an old photo — experts say now it’s worth $5 million because of the person in it
A lot has been written about notorious outlaws in the Wild West, who have also been glamorized on screen by actors, but few have seen what they truly looked like. When a man bought an old photo for just $2 from a memorabilia shop, he had no idea that it was an extremely rare picture of a legend and was worth millions. Randy Guijarro had bought three old photos from a second-hand shop in Fresno County, California simply because he liked the aesthetics, but later realized that the people in the photos were Billy the Kid, his gang members, and his girlfriend.
“It’s not till [I] put it under a magnifying glass [that I thought], ‘Oh my, what have we got going on here?'" he told the US Sun. Guijarro and his wife Linda, spent several years on research to find evidence that could prove the photo's authenticity. "It took us a year [of] initial research, reading up and getting up to speed. Linda and I became authenticators and historians by default," he said.
The two spent more than 4 years, traveling throughout the Southwest calling people, and watching Westerns just to learn more about what was in their possession. Their hard work paid off when Kagin’s, an auction house, was able to authenticate the piece. The couple was finally sure that they owned one of the only two known photos of the gunslinger, and the auction house was able to insure the photo for $5 million. The auction house then spent around a year to track down the location where the picture was shot, and to locate the foundations of the building behind Billy the Kid and his friends in Chaves County, New Mexico, according to Artnet.
"There are a few of these so-called experts, and I’ve talked to them. I said, you’ve asked me to do these things, [I] went out and did them,” said Guijarro. "I lay out physical proof, I get nothing back. So, I don’t even like to give credence to their names anymore. They’re going to become people that will just have faded off into history," he added. To date, there is only one real photo of Billy the Kid, whose real name was Henry McCarty. The photo was later bought by billionaire Bill Koch who is an avid collector of art from the American West.
Billy the Kid was born in New York City and turned towards a life of crime after heading west. He later became a frontier outlaw with a hefty price on his head and died in a gunfight in 1881 at the young age of 21. “An original Billy the Kid photo is the holy grail of Western Americana,” Kagin’s David McCarthy told the Guardian. “We had to be certain that we could answer and verify where, when, how, and why this photograph was taken. Simple resemblance is not enough in a case like this,” he added. Although one may assume that the photograph will fetch a high price at an auction, the sale still isn't guaranteed.
