Ansel Adams photos found at garage sale worth $200 million

Experts: Ansel Adams photos found at garage sale worth $200 million
By Alan Duke, CNN - July 27, 2010 9:01 p.m. EDT

Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- Rick Norsigian kept two boxes he bought at a garage sale under his pool table for four years before realizing they may be too valuable to store at home. The Fresno, California, commercial painter learned this week that what was in those boxes he paid $45 dollars for a decade ago could be worth more than $200 million. "When I heard that $200 million, I got a little weak," Norsigian said at a Beverly Hills art gallery Tuesday.

Art, forensic, handwriting and weather experts teamed up to conclude the 65 glass plates in the boxes were photographic negatives created more than 80 years ago by Ansel Adams, the iconic American photographer whose images of the West inspired the country.

Adams heirs skeptical about lost negatives claim

Powerful Days

Charles Moore; photographed civil rights violence: his obit appeared 16 March 2010. His colleague, writer Michael S. Durham, wrote "Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore" (1991). A 1995 documentary was made about him, "Charles Moore: I Fight with My Camera."


"I've never seen such hate in anyone's face before," he later said, according to John Kaplan, a professor at the University of Florida, who wrote his master's degree project on Mr. Moore. "It was like I were vermin."