Ten years ago, Rick Norsigian purchased negatives at a Fresno garage sale for $45. It turns out those negatives were the work of noted photographer Ansel Adams, and they're actually worth $200 million. AP (via CBS 5) reports, "a team of experts has concluded the 65 negatives are Adams' early work believed destroyed in a fire decades ago."
Adams is famous for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, most notably for his shots of Yosemite National Park.
Update:: Matthew Adams, son of Ansel Adams, disputes the authenticity of the negatives via a lengthy post at The Ansel Adams Gallery. While discussing Norsigian's Fresno find, he writes:
The question that cannot be proven is how these photographs ended up in a storage facility in Los Angeles. Mr. Norsigian’s team speculates that they may have been a part of Ansel’s teaching process at the Art Center School in Los Angeles in 1941. It is reasonable to assume that Ansel would have used some of his negatives during a teaching process, and perhaps even damaged ones. What is less clear is how Ansel would have let negatives get out of his care, in any circumstance. Particularly after the fire, Ansel was very careful about his negatives. He kept them in a bank vault in San Francisco, and would go to the bank to pull a negative to work with. How 61 negatives could get out of his possession is hard to fathom.
