John Rogers, owner of the Rogers Photo Archive in North Little Rock, announced Monday that he had bought at auction a 1930's photograph of a nude Joe DiMaggio in the showers at Yankee Stadium.

"The one-of-a-kind photo sold for $17,233.07 and captures a smiling DiMaggio," the Rogers Photo Archive said in a news release.

A version of the image is available here.

Rogers, owner of a huge collection of historic images, has previously acquired the entire archives of publications that include the Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Post, Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, the St. Petersburg Times, Seattle Times and Boston Herald. The addition of the Seattle Times and Boston Herald archives brought the Rogers Photo Archive to more than 40 million photos.

"The Rogers Photo Archive is the leading preservation-restoration service for newspaper photograph archives," the release said.

"The typical arrangement with the newspaper publications involves Rogers' acquisition of the physical prints and negatives while the newspaper gets the images returned to them in digital format with metadata attached. Metadata is information captured from the back of the photo, such as the photographer name, subject and caption. The benefit of this to the newspapers is that it is much easier for publication employees to access their photo library. A digital library is by far a more efficient research resource but is usually too expensive for newspapers to undertake themselves."

Rogers said he had started a new venture called planetGIANT.com in January to merchandise the images to which he owns the copyright to.

"PlanetGIANT.com is an internet-based company that offers products such as removable wall art and digital posters and prints featuring premium quality, vintage imagery. Through various licensing agreements, planetGIANT.com has acquired personality rights with some of the most iconic sports and entertainment personalities in the world. Examples include Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, James Dean, Joe Louis, Vince Lombardi, Jackie Robinson, and Jayne Mansfield."

With Rogers' purchase of the Sporting News archives, he also acquired the Charles Conlon Collection. Conlon is considered one of the greatest baseball photographers.

"The website TheConlonCollection.com launched earlier this month which has presented for the first time Charles Conlon's historic and iconic body of work," Rogers said.