Negatives found in garage sale worth millions (Ansel Adams)

Source: ABC



An American collector has become an overnight multi-millionaire after a set of 65 glass negatives he picked up at a garage sale turned out to be genuine Ansel Adams works. Rick Norsigian, a school district painter and collector, bought the photographic plates in Fresno, California for $US45 a decade ago. They have now been authenticated and are valued at $US200 million ($223 million).

"The experts have emphatically determined that the negatives were in fact created by the iconic photographer Ansel Adams," said Norsigian, who released the findings on his website and at a press conference. Mr Norsigian's lawyer Arnold Peter said the authentication presented a number of challenges, involving experts not only in photography but handwriting for notations and meteorology for evidence of weather at the time Adams took his famed landscape pictures.

"There is no definitive authority charged with authenticating photographs and unlike a painting there is no signature linking the work to the artist," Mr Peter said. "So we decided to apply the highest possible evidentiary standard we could think of.

"Every individual who has actually examined all the evidence we have gathered has come to the same conclusion - these are in fact the works of Ansel Adams."

Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/28/2966524.htm?section=entertainment

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2010/07/27/14847016.html


I was just reading about this not 10 minutes ago.

Be nice if they discussed why they think they are a fraud

:-)

wordplay