Lost Ansel Adams negatives found at garage sale

[keitaro]

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment...ams-trove?bn=1

A Fresno, Calif., man who spent $45 on two boxes of negatives at a garage sale 10 years ago has had them authenticated as lost works of the iconic American photographer Ansel Adams worth an estimated $200 million (all figures U.S. dollars).

Adams, who is perhaps the best-known photographer of the American landscape of the early 20th century, saw a fire destroy his studio in 1937. He believed hat most of the negatives of his early career, from 1919 through the early 1930s, had been lost forever.

Rick Norsigian happened upon two boxes of negatives at a garage sale in 2000. Believing he recognized some of the images from various publications, he began a decade-long quest to authenticate their source.

In a news conference Tuesday, David W. Streets, an art appraiser in Beverly Hills, revealed the images as verifiably by Adams himself.

Adams, a renowned photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco in 1902. He began to achieve fame in the 1940s for his silvery black-and-white landscapes of iconic scenes of the American west, such as Yosemite National Park in California and Glacier National Park in Montana.

Perhaps his most famous photographs, of snow-laden trees in Northern California’s High Sierra mountains, taken just as a violent winter storm receded, were shown at Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institute in 1931, beginning his rise to international prominence.

Adams died in 1984, in Monterrey, Calif. He was 82.

Man, who ever bought those boxes of negs is a lucky guy, and a guy with good taste in art. It's great to see Ansel Adams work being found.

[asian_speedster]

What a find!

Its amazing that people find this stuff and then make the connection to have it authenticated.

[Levitron]

http://www.petapixel.com/2010/07/29/...ed/#more-13151