A simple photo of potato sells for a stunning $1.5m

That's a lot of dough for a photo of a potato!

Photographer Kevin Abosch, known for taking portraits of celebrities like Johnny Depp and Steven Spielberg, sold a photograph he took of an Irish spud for a cool $1.5 million, Yahoo news reports quoting London's Sunday Times.

The selling price of the portrait, titled "Potato #345," is a little "absurd," Abosch told the paper. He said the deal with an unnamed European businessman came about over a dinner at his house in Paris.

"We had two glasses of wine, and he said, 'I really like that.' Two more glasses of wine, and he said, 'I really want that,'" Abosch told the paper.

The deal was struck two weeks later. Abosch says it's the most he's been paid for a portrait that wasn't commissioned, Yahoo news reported.

So why did he decide to photograph this particular spud? Abosch told the Times that the potato arrived at his house in a batch of organic vegetables in 2010. He took photos of a number of potatoes and isn't sure of the variety of this particular one.

"I see commonalities between humans and potatoes that speak to our relationship as individuals within a collective species. Generally, the life of a harvested potato is violent and taken for granted. I use the potato as a proxy for the ontological study of the human experience," Abosch told the Irish Times.

There are two other prints of the potato — one in Abosch's private collection and another that was donated to an art museum in Serbia.