Negatives 'authenticated' as Ansel Adams' work — but by whom?

Rick Norsigian couldn't win over experts on the photographer, so his authentication report was by two relative unknowns. And even they doubt the find is worth $200 million.

Rick Norsigian holding up a print from the found negatives. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times / July 27, 2010)

The case of the "lost" Ansel Adams negatives that purportedly are worth $200 million has turned into a public argument between Rick Norsigian, who found them at a Fresno garage sale 10 years ago, and the great photographer's family and former associates and leading art-photography dealers, who deny that Adams took them.

It was important for Norsigian to trace a path for the negatives to L.A., where Art Center was then based, because the man he bought them from in Fresno in 2000 had said he acquired them in the 1940s at a warehouse salvage sale in Los Angeles.

"It will never be possible to know why [Adams] left them in storage," Alt said in the report. Adams' associates say the photographer, known for safeguarding his work in a bank vault or in a concrete bunker behind his house, would not have let 65 of his pictures vanish.


Read the whole story at Los Angeles Times, by Mike Boehm