More on Adams Photos and Uncle Earl

Fellow appraiser Louise Allrich, ASA sent me two additional links on the intersting story of the near Ansel Adams glass negatives. The first if from the UK Daily Mail, the second is from the LA Times.  Both are interesting to read.

The UK Daily Mail stated

The only fly in the ointment for Mr Norsigian is that Adams' family has cast doubt on the find.

And now relatives of a nature photographer called 'Uncle Earl' or 'Pop Laval' have claimed he took the images.

Miriam Walton says her uncle Earl Brooks, an amateur photographer who lived in California in the 1920s - the decade experts said the photos were taken - is behind the images.

The 87-year-old from Oakland, California, saw the photos in news reports and called in experts to study some of the snaps she owned, specifically that of Jeffrey Pine, a much-photographed tree on top of Sentinel Dome at Yosemite, California.

'I'm looking at the picture that's hanging on my wall and I knew that Ansel Adams didn't take them,' Mrs Walton said.

'I knew my Uncle Earl took them.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1299227/Has-Ansel-Adams-mystery-garage-sale-negatives-solved.html#ixzz0wzKhYvPd

For the UK Daily Mail click HERE.

The LA Times reported

Nichols told The Times last week that the slight differences in the tree's shadow and the clouds behind it were probably caused by a short time lapse between the taking of each picture. Everything else -- the focus, brightness and angle, were the same. It was the best evidence yet, he said, of what he and other dealers, as well as Adams' family and professional circle of former assistants already had concluded: that Norsigian's negatives had been shot by somebody other than America's greatest nature photographer.

On Friday, Nichols sent digital images of Marian Walton's four pictures to William Turnage, Ansel Adams' former business manager and now managing trustee in charge of granting the rights to publish or copy Adams' work, and to Alan Ross, John Sexton and Rod Dresser, photographers who worked closely with Adams as his assistants during the 10 years before his death in 1984.

Last year, Norsigian's team sent Ross 61 of the images, hoping he would confirm that they had been taken by Adams. He didn't. So, Ross was able to make comparisons not just between Walton's prints and the 17 pictures Norsigian had published, but also to most of the Norsigian find.

The findings: One of Walton's prints, showing Old Inspiration Point road in Yosemite, is a seemingly identical match to an unpublished Norsigian image, Ross and Sexton said in e-mails that Turnage shared with The Times.

For  the LA Times, click HERE.