Disaster Girl: The Four-Year-Old at the Fire, and the Half a Million Dollars

A house burns behind her. Firefighters work in the background. In the foreground a small girl in a green coat looks directly into the lens with a faint knowing smile, as though the fire is going exactly to plan and she would prefer you did not ask questions.

She is Zoë Roth. She was four years old. The fire was real and entirely fine.

What Was Actually Going On

In January 2005 the local fire department in Mebane, North Carolina, ran a controlled burn of a house that was due for demolition. This is standard training practice and the neighbourhood turned out to watch, which is also standard, because a house fire that nobody has to worry about is genuinely excellent entertainment.

Her father, Dave Roth, brought a camera. He asked her to look at him. She produced the expression.

Why it’s weird: the smile is completely ordinary if you know the context and completely sinister if you do not, and the internet was never going to be given the context.

The Slow Route to Fame

This one did not go viral immediately either. Her father entered the photograph into a magazine competition in 2008 and it won, and from there it moved into the reaction-image economy, where it acquired its role: the person who caused the catastrophe and is quietly pleased about it.

It has been used to represent governments, ex-partners, cats, operating system updates, and every individual who has ever pressed a button they were told not to press.

Growing Up as an Image

Roth has spoken about this in interviews with more equanimity than most people would manage. She grew up knowing that a picture of her aged four was a fixed part of the furniture of the internet, appearing on strangers’ screens daily, attached to jokes she had no part in. Her friends knew. Her classmates knew. It was simply a fact about her, like a birthmark.

She has said the family always found it funny rather than upsetting, which is partly luck and partly the fact that the joke is flattering. Disaster Girl is competent. She is in control. Being the internet’s symbol of quiet arson is a considerably better draw than most involuntary meme subjects get.

The Sale

In April 2021, with her father, she auctioned the original photograph as an NFT. It went for 180 ether, worth roughly half a million dollars at the time. She was a student. She has said publicly that the money went towards student loans and charitable donations, and that the family retained the copyright and a share of future resales.

That last detail is the one to notice. The 2021 wave of meme NFT sales was mocked at the time and much of the underlying market did collapse afterwards, but for a handful of people who had spent fifteen years as unpaid public property, the timing worked out. She got paid for her own face. The internet had been using it for free since she was in primary school.

The Standing Question

Every entry in this series eventually arrives at the same problem. None of these people volunteered. A baby on a beach, a man at a stock photo shoot, a child at a fire. The images were taken legitimately and then acquired a second life that no consent form anticipated.

Disaster Girl is the rare case where the story ends with the subject holding both the copyright and the cheque, which should be the normal outcome and remains an unusual one.

Our advice, unchanged since 2015: hang on to your negatives.