But for South Africans, the pictures offered something more than an investment, a rare window into a painful history.
The main picture and the following photographs offer views of both ends of the Class 32-000 locomotive.
Like much else in a Presidential race, these pictures offer a blend of reality and symbolism.
But for the daughter, who does not associate much experience with the photograph, the picture does not offer any sort of access.
The pictures offer further evidence of the city as an organism subject to constant change, decay and rebirth.
Sixty years later, the pictures they took, more than 720,000, offer a moment of the city's history frozen in time.
Unfortunately these "aerial" pictures offer little information about the mechanics of the biological system in question.
In the school's art room, though, the pictures on the walls offered a different perspective.
Combining inside and out, his pictures offer striking metaphors for the public and private faces of family life.
The pictures package nostalgia in series and offer a fashion historian a miniature history of some 50 years of American styles.