An authentic brouhaha

August 22, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Ansel Adams negatives may be worth $200 million

By MIKE BOEHM

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

The case of the “lost” Ansel Adams negatives that purportedly are worth $200 million has turned into a public argument between Rick Norsigian, who found them at a garage sale 10 years ago, and the photographer’s family and former associates and leading art-photography dealers, who deny that Adams took them.

The brouhaha might have been avoided had Norsigian, a painter for the Fresno school district, taken the advice of Adams biographer Jonathan Spaulding. Norsigian had brought the negatives to Spaulding’s office at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; Spaulding suggested that he send them to a museum or public archive where professionals could make a thorough study.

Instead, Norsigian went on trying to authenticate the pictures on his own. Eventually he assembled a team of paid experts — virtual unknowns in the photography world. The report and appraisal Norsigian issued last month made headlines because it concluded not only that the 65 glass-plate negatives had been taken by Adams in the 1920s and early 1930s but also that they were worth at least $200 million.

Norsigian’s top authenticators, art consultant Robert C. Moeller III and photographer Patrick Alt, respectively described that sum recently as “puzzling” and a “bunch of crap.”

Spaulding, now executive director of the Museum of the American West at LA’s Autry National Center, recalled how Norsigian had visited him about seven years ago. Spaulding says he told Norsigian that although the pictures could have been taken by Adams, the best thing would be to get them to curators, who would know how to do tests.

“They looked like rather clich d views of Yosemite, technically skillful but really not outstanding,” recalled Spaulding. “But that wasn’t totally inconsistent. Ansel was in his 20s then, and it wasn’t inconceivable that he was doing work of that sort. But it felt to me like it could have been any number of commercial photographers working at that time.”

Norsigian failed to enlist people like Spaulding, whose “Ansel Adams and the American Landscape” was published in 1995, or Mary Street Alinder, Adams’ chief assistant from 1979 until his death in 1984. Instead, Norsigian ended up with Alt and Moeller.

“I don’t recognize the names. It seems very questionable to me,” said Deborah Klochko, executive director of San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts.

“To think you can authenticate these to make a lot of money; that’s a problem right there,” she added. She said she hopes Norsigian will donate his find.

Alinder said she looked at the pictures with an open mind when Norsigian approached her in 2002, thinking “it would be wonderful” if he indeed had unearthed unknown Ansel Adams pictures. But “I thought almost all of them did not measure up,” she said, although the handwriting on the sleeves containing the negatives did look to her like that of Virginia Adams, the photographer’s wife. She said she continued to help Norsigian with contacts to pursue his quest, then stopped in 2004 after he offered her 25 percent of any earnings from future sales of the negatives in return for helping him prove their authenticity.

“I don’t think Mr. Norsigian is a bad person, but he wants so hard to believe this that he doesn’t see all the corners he’s bent,” she said.

Norsigian responded through his attorney, Arnold Peter, whose firm is helping him market prints and posters. Norsigian offered Alinder a percentage of earnings to serve as a consultant, Peter said, but she would not have been required to vouch for their authenticity. “He had basically hit a wall,” Peter said. “People would tell him these were Ansel Adams works but wouldn’t go on record, and she could help by opening doors, making introductions.”

As for Norsigian’s reluctance to donate his find for study, Peter said, “We live in a capitalist system, and there’s nothing wrong with Mr. Norsigian profiting from the time and resources he’s put into this project.”

Norsigian’s claim rests for now on two handwriting experts’ opinion that it’s Virginia Adams’ writing on the manila sleeves and on opinions by Alt and Moeller. Alt is a Culver City, Calif., photographer who has a bachelor’s degree from California Institute of the Arts and a master’s in painting and photography from UC Irvine; he says he has studied Adams’ methods intensely and applies them to his own work.

“I don’t have an academic credential for this, but I feel as if my knowledge is as in-depth or more so” than many museum-based scholars, Alt said. “The problem I have with so many curators is they’ve never looked through a camera.”

In the report, he speculated from scorch marks on some negatives that they had survived a 1937 fire at Adams’ studio, and Virginia Adams was hurriedly enlisted to catalog them. Alt theorizes Adams showed them to his students at what’s now Art Center College of Design in Pasadena “to regale them with what was surely a great story.”