Garage sale photos valued at 200 million dollars

Jul 27, 2010, 21:18 GMT

Los Angeles - A set of glass-plate negatives picked up at a garage sale for 45 dollars were taken by legendary US photographer Ansel Adams and are worth about 200 million dollars, art experts said Tuesday.

The incredible find went on display Tuesday at a Beverly Hills gallery, after a lengthy process of authentication confirmed them to be the work of Adams, whose black-and-white images of Yosemite National Park are among the most iconic of US landscape images.

The negatives had been thought to have been destroyed in a warehouse fire, but painter Richard Norsigian discovered them in a garage sale about 10 years ago in Fresno, California, and bargained the price down from 70 dollars to 45 dollars.

Norsigian didn't realize the provenance of the plates when he purchased them, but soon after he noticed similarities between them and Adams' work and later hired a lawyer to coordinate a team of experts to authenticate the find.

They attributed the negatives to Adams and said the photographs were taken between 1919 and the early 1930s, well before Adams became widely recognized in the 1940s.

'It truly is a missing link of Ansel Adams and history and his career,' said David W Streets, the appraiser and art dealer who is showing the negatives at his gallery.

In addition to images of Yosemite the negatives depict California's Carmel Mission, views of a rocky point in Carmel, San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, a sailing yacht at sea and an image of sand dunes.

'The fact that these locations were well-known to Adams, and visited by him, further supports the proposition that all of the images in the collection were most probably created by Adams,' art expert Robert Moeller told CNN.

Moeller said that after six months of study, he concluded 'with a high degree of probability, that the images under consideration were produced by Ansel Adams.