Experts authenticate Ansel Adams 'lost negatives'



LOS ANGELES- Sixty-five photographic plates bought at a garage sale for 45 dollars have been authenticated as the work of famed photographer Ansel Adams and valued at 200 million dollars, the owner said Tuesday.
Rick Norsigian, a school district painter and collector who bought the glass negatives at a Fresno, California, garage sale in 2000 and spent years seeking to verify they were from Adams, released the findings on his website and at a press conference in Los Angeles.



"The experts have emphatically determined that the negatives were in fact created by the iconic photographer Ansel Adams," Norsigian said.
Norsigian's lawyer Arnold Peter said the authentication represented a number of challenges, involving experts not only in photography but handwriting for notations and meteorology for evidence of weather at the time Adams took his famed landscape pictures.
"There is no definitive authority charged with authenticating photographs and unlike a painting there is no signature linking the work to the artist," Peter said.
"So, we decided to apply the highest possible evidentiary standard we could think of. Every individual who has actually examined all the evidence we have gathered has come to the same conclusion -- these are in fact the works of Ansel Adams."
The specialists assembled by Norsigian all backed the claims.
Michael Nattenberg and Marcel Matley, two independent handwriting experts, said that handwriting on the envelopes in which the negatives were found belonged to Adams' wife, Virginia.
George Wright, a meteorological expert, concluded that one of the pictures found in the Norsigian negatives was taken on the same day and time as one of Adams' famous images.
Robert Moeller, former curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts concluded: "After more than six months of close study, it is my opinion, within a high degree of probability, that the images under consideration were produced by Ansel Adams."
Art appraiser David Streets said he estimated the negatives' value at a minimum of 200 million dollars, based on current sales of Adams' prints and the potential for selling reproductions.
Adams, who died in 1984, was believed to have lost many of his negatives in 1937 in a fire in his darkroom. The blaze destroyed as many as 5,000 negatives, or around one-third of his portfolio. Many of the negatives had never been developed into photographs.
Adams was one of the foremost nature photographers of his era, known for his images of the American west, especially Yosemite National Park.
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Wednesday, July 28th 2010
AFP
           


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