FRESNO -- A trove of old glass negatives bought by a Fresno painter for $45 at a garage sale a decade ago has been authenticated as the work of iconic photographer Ansel Adams and are worth at least $200 million, a lawyer said Tuesday.
Attorney Arnold Peter said a team of experts has concluded the 65 negatives are from the early work of Adams, one of the United State's foremost nature photographers. It was believed the work had been destroyed in a fire in 1937.
Rick Norsigian, a 64-year-old painter for Fresno Unified School District and an avid antiques collector, said that after he bought the glass negatives, he noticed they resembled Adams' photographs of Yosemite National Park. He spent years consulting experts in an attempt to prove they were authentic despite repeated claims from Adams' family that they were not the work of the famed photographer.
Eventually, Norsigian hired Peter to assemble a team of experts, who announced the findings of their final report at a news conference Tuesday morning at a Beverly Hills art gallery.
"These photographs are really the missing link," Peter said Tuesday. "They really fill the void in Ansel Adams' early career." Adams is best known for his striking black-and-white photographs, mainly landscapes, of the American West. He died in 1984 at age 82.
Art appraiser David W. Streets said he conservatively estimated the negatives' value at $200 million, based on current sales of Adams' prints and the potential for selling reproductions.
"When I heard that $200 million (figure), I got a little weak," Norsigian said at the news conference.
An exhibition of 17 of the photographs is planned for October at California State University, Fresno, and a documentary is planned on the negatives' sale and authentication, Peter said. A website for selling prints also has been established, he said.
In October, Norsigian and Peter showed off the negatives to local news media at a conference room in a Clovis hotel. They said their photography and restoration experts believed the negatives may be Adams' early work -- pictures taken in the 1920s and early 1930s before Adams became wildly popular.
For example, they said, the negatives were found in manila envelopes with notes that a handwriting expert had identified as written by Virginia Adams, Ansel Adams' wife. Most of the photos were of nature scenes in Yosemite National Park and San Francisco -- two places that were often the subject of Ansel Adams' photographs.
The experts were hired by Peter's Los Angeles law firm, which has been working closely with Norsigian for more than three years.
Not everyone is convinced. Most notably, Matthew Adams, the photographer's grandson and president of the Ansel Adams Gallery, has said there's "no absolute proof as to who did take them."
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