Beats Us

We've been following for the past month-and-a-half or so the bizarre case of the purported "lost" Ansel Adams negatives discovered by one, Rick Norsigian, who claims he bought the sixty-five glass plate negatives at a garage sale in Fresno ten years ago from an unsuspecting seller for $45, and which negatives he and his handpicked experts estimate are worth some $200M. Since Norsigian's public announcement of the discovery, the provenance of the negatives has been called into question by other experts, most of whom, unlike Norsigian's handpicked experts, have no ax to grind, and the controversy continues up to the present day.

The question we have is, Of what artwork value are the negatives even were their authenticity not in dispute? Answer: Pretty much zero except to highly skilled photography experts who might derive a satisfying or even thrilling aesthetic experience merely contemplating their technical and compositional excellence if the negatives are indeed the work of Adams himself.

But the core of Adams's aesthetic genius resided not in his creation of the negative, but in his creation of the print from that negative. While it's true that a fundamental element of Adams's working procedure involved what he called the "previsualization" of the finished print while examining the scene to be shot on the ground glass of his camera, and the subsequent necessary adjustments of exposure time and the development of the negative in the darkroom, Adams considered the negative to be no more than a detailed blueprint for the finished work, that finished work being the print. Or as Adams, a gifted pianist, put it metaphorically, the negative is but the [mute] score; the print, the [audible] performance.

Well, Adams is dead and no longer available to "perform" his negatives. Others may do "performances" of those negatives, but those performances can never be an Adams performance, and are therefore worth, aesthetically and monetarily, but a pittance of an original Adams as works of art. So whence the gigantic money valuation of Norsigian's find even if the negatives prove authentic as no museum or gallery, not even the most avid wealthy private collector, would pay anywhere near $200M merely to own the negatives?

Beats us.