Ansel Adams's Family Questions Authenticity of Garage Sale Find

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Now the Adams family wants to call the shots.

Famed photographer Ansel Adams's representatives and family members are questioning the recent discovery and sale of the artist's long-lost negatives, valued by antique collectors, meteorologists and two handwriting experts at $200 million.

They claim the photographs, are "next to worthless" and an "unfortunate fraud." They also paint the founder, Fresno painter Rick Norsigian, who found the 65 glass negatives for $45 at a garage sale 10 years ago, out to be a sort of con artist.

"We've been dealing with him for a decade," said Bill Turnage, managing director of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. "I can't tell you how many times he's called me."

Turnage claims that Norsigian has been on an "obsessive quest" for nearly a decade.



Grandson Matthew Adams, curator of the Ansel Adams Gallery in San Francisco, disputes the authenticity of the negatives, saying that the only negatives ever to be misplaced were in a 1937 fire at his Yosemite National Park Studio. He also claims that a number of photographers took pictures in that time-period and points out that there are some incorrect spellings of some Yosemite places on the negative sleeve.

"There is no real hard evidence," he said. "I'm skeptical."

Turnage claims the value of Ansel Adams's famed photographs are not found in the actual negative itself, but in the "interpretation" of the negative. "Ansel interpreted the negative very heavily," he said. "He believed the negative was like a musical score. No two composers will interpret it the same way," he said. "Each print is a work of art."

With Norsigian's plan to capitalize even more on the exposure and sale of the photographs in the works, the Adams family plans to sue him for using a copyrighted name for commercial purposes.