Supposed Ansel Adams Negs Found at a Garage Sale

If these were Ansel's negatives, where are the institutions that would be thrilled to see them? He was shot down by them one after another. Real experts don't think they are Ansel's negs. The "experts" he hired have nothing to do with photography.

The most damning thing I read in all of this, and the one that makes the most sense, is the misspelling on the envelopes of the places the photographs were taken. If you are Virginia Adams, spending your life in Yosemite, and being an educated woman, would you misspell a place you have been to 1000 times? I doubt it.

This is going to end badly for the people trying to profit from it. If someone buys a print and then has it appraised by a real expert they are going to be in for a shock.

But as they say, there is a sucker born every minute.

JBrunner said:

Threads merged. This thing has more merges than a midnight run to In-n-Out in Los Angeles.

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Ahh, yes. Sitting here an hour northeast of Seattle and wearing my In-N-Out tee shirt I'm reminded of just how much I miss a Double-Double, Fries and A Coke.

But I digress...

Ken

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment...ale-buy-is-now-worth-223m-20100728-10vhz.html

Now the front page news in Sydney, Australia.

Ken Nadvornick said:

Ahh, yes. Sitting here an hour northeast of Seattle and wearing my In-N-Out tee shirt I'm reminded of just how much I miss a Double-Double, Fries and A Coke.

But I digress...

Ken

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I'm happy to go pick up an order and send it to you. Might be a little cold when it gets there. How about you source the Coke locally? Are you sure just a Double-Double? A 4x4 costs the same to ship.

Seems Adam's heirs are a bit skeptical too....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100728...Ec2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDYWRhbXNoZWlyc3Nr

Garage sale find called pricey Ansel Adams lot

Ten years ago, Rick Norsigian made a $200 million find.

The Fresno, Calif., painter — who has a penchant for antique hunting on his days off — was rummaging through boxes at a garage sale when he came across 65 glass negatives that were wrapped in newspapers from 1942 and 1943.

Turns out the negatives, which Norsigian bought for $45 after talking the seller down from $70, are those of the famous nature photographer Ansel Adams. And they’re worth hundreds of millions, according to some appraisers.

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Never have I ever had a deal like this. I have had some good deals in my life, but I have never turned $45 into so much as ONE million dollars!

I am thoroughly pissed.

If they are authentic they have value as insight, much more than as any sort of "lost masterpieces". I was just thinking, how many negatives of Adams' never got printed because they didn't make the cut? Already sitting in the archives are likely to be many images like that, any of which may be interesting, but none of which are Adams' best.

Another thread merged and title updated so maybe people won't feel the urge to create more new threads about this topic.

Good luck with that, David.

please see below this excerpt from a email i recieved from my friend Alan Ross




Dear Mitch,

This is going to be a quick message in response to numerous emails I have received concerning some glass plate negatives purchased by a Mr. Norsigian at a California garage sale, and which he attributes authorship of to Ansel Adams. He now seems to be claiming that the plates have been "authenticated" at a value of $200,000,000. The Norsigian group contacted me earlier this year, and I have seen jpegs of all the images. I do not believe they ARE the work of Ansel Adams. See below for my opinion.

Cheers,


alan@rossimages.net
www.alanrossphotography.com



CNN Newsbreak:
"Experts: Ansel Adams photos found at garage sale worth $200 million"

Interestingly enough, the New York Times has not seen fit to provide coverage of this claim as yet.

The images in the Norsigian collection do seem to be the work of a competent photographer working in Yosemite, San Francisco and Carmel. In a format used by AA in the late 20's. The camera locations are similar to known Adams favorites - but then, most of those were primary tourist viewpoints offering an obvious place to plant a camera.

Some of the images are of yachting scenes on San Francisco Bay. Nothing of any similarity in subject or format exists in the Adams Archive. LIkewise some utterly bland images of a Spanish-style mission.

A major claim in the voice for authenticity is that one image - I believe of the Jeffrey Pine on Sentinel Dome - shows some same/similar cloud formations as exist in a known Adams image. Anyone who knew Ansel also knows that he very often had fellow photographers at his side - either by invitation or coincidence - when he was out photographing. The clouds could easily have been recorded by a different camera a few feet away.

The plates seem to show signs of fire damage. Yes, Ansel's Yosemite darkroom caught fire in 1938 and a number of prized negatives were lost. For me, this is the weak-link/downfall of the authenticity claimants. Ansel was working with a 6.5x8.5 plate camera when he did Monolith in 1927. The fire was in 1938. A good number of negatives made prior to the fire had been printed many times - Pine Branches in Snow comes to mind, for one example. As well as I know Ansel's work, and as far as I have otherwise heard, not ONE authenticated AA print from ANY of the Norsigian plates is known. If it was a good image - and some of these are - Ansel couldn't have NOT resisted making more than one print of each - and even then SOME would have survived to exist in Ansel's own archive or in the collections of photgapehr and Sierra Club friends.

They are some nice images, but I cannot believe they are the work of Ansel Adams.

And 200 million dollars is ______. You fill in the blank.





Alan

Hey, I just found out some dude bought glass plates of Ansel Adams' exposures at a garage sale. I think I'll start a new thread on the subject. People need to know.

.....

Whether they are Ansel's or not, is not the only thing that will determine their value. Ansel had stated that he shot some 40,000 images in his lifetime. The real value question is; Is a print made from another printer, from a negative that may or may not be Ansel's worth be as much as a print and neg that we know as fact was made by Ansel? And the secondary factor is: Is a mediocre image, that may or may not be from Ansel, really worth anything anyway? It's not like they found a second neg of "Moonrise". And while there may be tens of thousands of verified Ansel negatives out there, many of them, most likely the vast majority of them have little value or attraction except his name. Even the best photographers have boxes filled with mediocre images.

Realistically how does a mediocre image, of uncertain origin, printed and interpreted by a second party, get valued so highly? I'm an Ansel fan. I wouldn't pay anything for a print under those circumstances.

Early Riser said:

Realistically how does a mediocre image, of uncertain origin, printed and interpreted by a second party, get valued so highly?

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Just hype, of course. You need a big number to get publicity & these people have managed that. It disgusts me how the media will play a part in furthering this nonsense. There is no fact checking or scepticism, because they know it's a nice little story to get people clucking away.

As a side issue, does the fact that the Adams estate have publically claimed that they are not Adams' images mean that they will have no claim with regard to copyright if someone starts to sell prints from them?


Steve.

If the estate disavows the images as not being Ansel's own images, they would have no claim to the images themselves - but for someone else to represent the images as being by Ansel Adams would infringe upon their trademark of the name, an act for which the infringers would be liable. Think about it in terms of someone "finding" a bunch of designs for cars that Ford never made, but might have been designed in the Ford design studios, then built cars from those designs in a sweatshop in Khazakhstan, and claimed the cars were in fact Fords.

Early Riser said:

Whether they are Ansel's or not, is not the only thing that will determine their value. Ansel had stated that he shot some 40,000 images in his lifetime. The real value question is; Is a print made from [...]

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If they are not Ansel's, any other consideration would be a waste of time.
So that is the real value question that has to be answered first and foremost.

And isn't the consensus that they are not?

I will say that any mention of analog photography is good for our community and what we love. Thanks to the news outlets, people's attention is being brought to things like "glass negatives", "darkroom prints", and you can bet your buttons that a few young folks out there will be intrigued enough to start down the righteous path.

I wonder if in the future I'll find a shoebox full of SD cards containing the lost images of _______ (wait, who are the iconic photographer's of our day!?)

Would he charge less for the photographs if I requested them printed with a dot matrix printer rather than a stink-jet printer? :confused:

holmburgers said:

I will say that any mention of analog photography is good for our community and what we love. Thanks to the news outlets, people's attention is being brought to things like "glass negatives", "darkroom prints", and you can bet your buttons that a few young folks out there will be intrigued enough to start down the righteous path.

I wonder if in the future I'll find a shoebox full of SD cards containing the lost images of _______ (wait, who are the iconic photographer's of our day!?)

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I wonder if the idea of SD cards will seem as weird to future generations as the idea of a plate negative seems to most people today (I'm willing to bet that upwards of 90% of the media covering this story have no idea what that even means).

JBrunner said:

Threads merged. This thing has more merges than a midnight run to In-n-Out in Los Angeles.

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Be careful you don't waste your gas and time! They are only open that late on Fridays and Saturdays!

What good are astronomically-priced inkjet prints (OMG!) from supposedly Adams' negatives when the enduring trademark of Adams was his darkroom/printing skill? We all know how much importance Adams put to matching the negative to the print: "The Negative is the score. The print is the performance." No inkjet printer will ever get close to what Adams achieved in the darkroom and the buying public are none the wiser for being duped into believing such prints are identical to what the man himself would have printed. The whole thing is sounding very, very fishy.

I don't have too much of a problem believing they are Adams negatives. Stranger things can happen. As for the handwriting, handwriting analysis says a lot. Maybe Virginia was drunk. I know I misspell things sometimes, when writing quickly and not paying attention.

Also, I think it is a good thing that the "experts" Norsigian consulted are not part of the photography scene.

At any rate, we will not get any of the facts until they become public record, i.e. until this goes to court.

What I have a problem with is the pictures themselves, and that they are being reproduced and sold as inkjet prints under a trademark that is not owned by Norsigian (and for exorbitant prices, at that). Just because he owns the negatives themselves, and evidence points to the fact that they were made by Adams, it does not mean that he can sell prints from them as Adams' work.

All Norsigian had to do was make decent prints, sell them for reasonable prices, and not sell the photos as definite Adams work, and he would have made a good return on his investment...but that wasn't enough for him.

What would I have done? I would have offered them to the family for $45, and let them decide what to do with them. If it turned out the family decided that they were some of Adams' negs, I'll bet they would take care of me OK. Not set me up for life or anything, but I am sure the action would pay off.

Yes, 2F/2F, I do concur with that. There was mention of a large format photographer with 40 years' experience. But what relevance is that to the core aspect involving Adams printing, not just the negatives? "Experts"!? They could be flipping burgers for a living for all we know! Surely other people photographed the same scenes as Adams did, imitating his style? I think down the line we haven't heard the last of the Adams family's involvement in this, particularly in relation to the issue of copyright — Norsigian does not own copyright and never will (but negotiated Reassignment of Copyright though rare, is in itself worth millions). It does need a thorough work-out through the court system.

Sirius Glass said:

Would he charge less for the photographs if I requested them printed with a dot matrix printer rather than a stink-jet printer? :confused:

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I've got an original ANSI text rendition of the last supper that I'm offering for a mere $10,000. (I bet Chris W needs this one. )

I have not read or seen any evidence to support these glass negatives as the work of AA.
Where are the film-holder edge shadow analysis results?
What is the density range that the images are developed to? How does that density range compare to other AA glass negatives from the time?
The envelopes with writing on them...do they match those of other known negatives? Has the paper been tested against known AA envelopes?
Has the ink on the paper been tested against the ink on known AA envelopes?
Has the glass been tested and compared to the glass of other AA glass negatives? Thickness, actual size, glass composition, transmission spectrum etc.
I read no fingerprints were found. What is the evidence? How many plates examined? How were the plates tested for finger prints? Who tested them?
I read the images came from a Korona View. How was that determined?
Some negatives are said to be "charred" so lets see the chemical analysis of the black powder.

FACT: No AA prints are known from these negatives
FACT: AA was not the only person using glass negatives
FACT: AA's name is not written on any of the negatives or envelopes
FACT: There is no currently know historical document that makes reference to "missing AA negatives"

My OPINION is that the inkjet prints of these negatives will be worthless until Richard Prince copies them....