"Ansel Adams" plates found at garage sale

[Brian Ellis]

Well, they seem to have gone out of their way to detour the opinion of anyone directly connected to the alleged source of the negatives, or who had relevant direct experience handling AA's negatives. That kind of lopsided approach to the question should be enough in itself to make someone suspicious.

Exactly. Anyone at all knowledgeable had to be suspicious just from looking at the panel of "experts" - a "burden of proof" expert whatever that is, a former prosecutor, a camera maker and refinisher, etc. Where were the curators, historians, former Adams assistants, someone from the Adams archives at the University of Arizona , Alan Ross who's probably printed more Adams negatives than Adams himself, et al. The obvious answer is that whenever he went to people like that (e.g. the Adams family and Rondel Partridge) he got answers he didn't like. Which is why IMHO he wasn't just an innocent who got carried away with his obsession. That may be how he started but I think he began seeing dollar signs and thereafter became a total fraud.

[Kevin Crisp]

I think it unfair to disparage Patrick Alt as just a woodworker or refinisher. He is an excellent photographer too. He showed me his work when I bought his darkroom sink many years ago. Whether he has the expertise to authenticate unknown negatives is another story. I also don't know what a 'burden of proof expert' is and I've been a civil trial attorney for almost 30 years.

My vote still goes with Uncle Earl. Even if they were Ansel's, and he never printed any of them in his long and productive life, what does that tell you? I know what I think of my negatives I've never bothered to print. The $200M valuation is so ridiculous it is hard to give the authentication project any credibility whatsoever. You can order inexpensive real photographic prints made from real Ansel Adams negatives from the library of congress. Or special edition prints printed by very good printers.

[Merg Ross]

Dear Heroique;
I agree with you completely and am astounded by the vitriol being spewed by Mr. Turnage. I met Ansel Adams in 1956 and remained friends with him until his death and I can assure you that as important as his photographic legacy was to him, he was also the most generous, kind and gentle man, with the greatest sense of humor and ardent passion for his work and he would be appalled by this uncalled for behavior by someone he admired very much. Merg Ross knew Ansel much longer than I did and I'm sure he would agree with me. While I don't believe these negatives are by Ansel, for many different reasons, I certainly am not willing to convict those who believe otherwise, of being likened to the greatest villain who ever lived. What, in God's name, has become of civility in our country?
Denise Libby

Denise,

Yes, I do agree with your remarks about Ansel.

One would have thought, or at least hoped, that with his degree from Yale and study at Oxford, Bill Turnage could have been more eloquent in his speech. Or perhaps, as suggested, defer to Matthew Adams as spokesman for the AA Publishing Rights Trust.

[Andre Noble]

If decent glass negatives that are 80 years old by an advanced amateur go for only about $30, then why are genuine Ansel Adams prints so damn expensive?

One print he made and signed sold for $700,000 (Moonrise?)

Why Ansel's picture worth almost a million and not Uncle Earle's?

[Drew Wiley]

Andre - that $700,000 sale was basically an auction fluke. It was his most famous image, but he made lots of prints of that. But I'd have to reiterate what was just
pointed out a moment ago - if this set of negatives found in Fresno actually was AA's, and even he didn't bother to keep track or them, or basically discarded them, why should they be considered so valuable now? I can think of a lot of photographers I'd rather collect than AA, but to the general public this is the only name they recognize. That's why so many museums advertise AA exhitibions - they need to somehow sell tickets to raise money. He was just one of a string of famous photographers working in Yosemite, and a century from now might end up as obscure to the general public as some of the others are today. But a handful of very famous images just keep turning up over and over again. Let's just say that the AA
"brand" has been much more shrewdly marketed than that of Carleton Watkins, for example (whose work also suffered from fire). Frankly, if I had to keep looking at AA images, I'd like to see some new ones. But now with lawyers involved, that
beating a dead horse image we frequently see on this forum is going to be more
relevant than ever.

[Jim Galli]

If decent glass negatives that are 80 years old by an advanced amateur go for only about $30, then why are genuine Ansel Adams prints so damn expensive?

One print he made and signed sold for $700,000 (Moonrise?)

Why Ansel's picture worth almost a million and not Uncle Earle's?

Silly question and the answer is obvious. Because someone will pay it.

[lenser]

Concerning Bill Turnage's unfortunate choice of figures to cite, he did not in fact compare Mr. Norsigian to the monstrous Adolf Hitler, only the tactics in use to promote these negatives as being made by AA. Those tactics are the same used by just about every politician, promoter, attorney, defender of the gulf clean up situation, and/ or swindler of every ilk in history. Perhaps if he had used Bernie Madhoff to cite instead, the vitriol would not have been as extreme in reaction from the Norsigian camp.

This is most certainly a favorite tactic by any lawyer/promoter with an agenda to sell on behalf of a client, especially when huge money is part of the equation. Please note the source of the CNN response about Turnage and consider the agenda.

Turnage could just as easily have chosen P.T. Barnum, many lawyers, tons of advertising copy writers, most people in political office currently or in the process of running for office right down to a pair of candidates for local prosecutor who are fighting it out with their lies about each other right here in southwest Missouri at this moment. The big lie is an almost universal tactic and it is alive and well in this forum in terms of accusations going both ways.

My personal feeling is that it is not likely that these are Adam's negatives. Since I recognize that this is only a gut feeling, I'm going to watch the dust settle and see how things fall out with the true experts and hope that the outrageous accusations and rhetoric calm down both about, and by all parties while deferring to Shakespeare's wisdom about lawyers.

Now, is there a way to scientifically prove that these plates could be from the same darkroom fire, such as comparing chemical residues of the burned areas of samples from Adam's archive to charred samples from the trove being promoted by Mr. Norsigian? If they match spectrographically, that's a big plus for Mr. N's claim.

How about chemically comparing the wrappings or envelopes on the found batch to those actually in the Adams archive that were unquestionably signed or notated by Ansel or Virginia? What about carbon dating of those same items? DNA residue from either of their skin oil secretions that may still be impregnated in the papers? Fingerprints found on the Norsigian group's wrappings and or envevlopes? Using perfected archival and forensic testing like this seems much more appropriate to finding truth and proof, than through the thus far cited experts, especially those who's expertise relies only on stated opinion such as the hand writing experts.

[AgentX]

I am the entertainment attorney who has been working with a group of experts for the past three years to once and for all prove that over 60 glass negatives purchased at a Fresno garage sale were in fact created by Ansel Adams.

So your expert group set out to prove the negatives were made by Ansel Adams, not to investigate who might have made the negatives...

There's a big difference.

[Paul Ewins]

Andre, the key factor in print prices is supply and demand. The prints that make auction records are usually vintage prints, made at around the same time as the negative. You can buy brand new AA prints for $225 that are every bit as good as older ones that sell for many thousands more. The supply of the new ones is pretty much unlimited, while the supply of old prints is very small. It is a collector thing, not a rational thing.

The problem with the discovered plates (apart from who made them) is that any prints from them aren't "vintage" and never will be. There is no clue as to whether the person who took them even thought them good enough to print from. The "smoking gun" Uncle Earl print is different to the discovered plate, so if the plate was taken by Uncle Earl at the same session then even he chose a different version to print, so the plate wasn't good enough for UE let alone AA. Why would you buy a print from a neg that the photographer thought inferior?

Ten years ago I went to a commercial gallery show of photographs by Norman Lindsay. Lindsay was a famous children's author and an infamous artist (denounced by Bishops and MPs etc) - they made a film about him (Sirens) starring Sam Neill. Anyway the one thing he wasn't famous for was photography. It turns out that at one stage he tried taking photographs for reference rather than using live models or sitting in the landscape. He didn't like the results and gave up pretty quickly. The crappy results were indeed crappy but the gallery had somehow got access to the negs and were selling prints from them at $500 - $1000 based on the name alone.

[Drew Wiley]

For the ludicrous value assigned to the collection, you'd think DNA or fingerprint
evidence would be the first thing they'd look at, not the last. AA's fingerprints did end up on some of his known negatives. Again, rather than going down the obvious
path, they're taking an elliptical one. Why? I wouldn't personally go so far as to use
the term "crooks", but maybe just wishful thinking that already has so much invested that it's hard to back down.