On Wed, July 28, 2010 13:10, mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > Can you call them original Ansel Adams?? That's open to debate, but it > really isn't important as long as everyone is fully aware that Ansel > didn't print them. They sell "late-bottled vintage" wine; this is almost like that (maybe even a step further from completely normal original prints). But, as you say, the key point is not deceiving anybody. Given that the whole point is that these negatives were lost for a long time, I think there's less than usual chance of accidental confusion. > Was Ansel a master printer??? You bet a, but he > taught a lot of people to print over the years as well. Are they exactly > what Ansel would have done with the negative? Probably not. Are they as > collectible?? I doubt it but I wouldn't call them worthless either. Ed > Weston prints have been made long after he was gone by others, and they > are hardly worthless. Isn't it Brett that learned to print from Ed and > still from time to time works with those negatives?? It wouldn't have been > that rare for others to "help out", and after working with a given > photographer for a long time it would be reasonable to expect the work to > be in the spirit of an Ansel Adams print, even if Ansel didn't make it. I can't predict how actual collectors will behave, since to my mind they're all crazy. For the rest of us, seeing these is very interesting. If the evidence for their being by Adams holds up, I'll probably buy the book (a book is essentially inevitable in that case, right?). I'm not so likely to buy actual prints; I have almost no "real" prints by other photographers of any note. > No one could really know for sure if it was Ansel's wife that made the > notes. One handwriting expert may say yes, and another no. A misspelled > word isn't conclusive either. How many times have you been to a place > where you make a note in a hurry and have a senior moment? How many times > she may have been to a location or even knowing for sure she knew how to > spell any given word, doesn't mean she wasn't in a hurry and just simply > made a mistake. I don't know how seriously to take handwriting experts. It depends on how much they disagree, partly. > We won't really ever know for sure. Well -- if one of these images turns out to have been published or sold as prints back before the darkroom fire, I'll take that as being fairly conclusive evidence that these ARE Adams' negatives. But on the probabilities, yeah, I don't expect to ever really know for sure. > I am not sure Hoax is the right word. > A hoax is intentional. Maybe this one is, and if we later find out that > someone else made out those envelopes with an intent to deceive, the word > definitely applies. We have no evidence of that at this time. I agree. We certainly can't, yet, rule out the possibility of an actual hoax / fraud, but there's nothing especially pointing to it. The custody chain on the negatives is uncertain but not unreasonable. There's enough money possibly around that it could be a profitable fraud, so one has to keep a little alert. The valuations published are presumably the highest number anybody with any credibility could be induced to utter :-). Makes for good publicity, which will eventually increase sales. I hope the foundation and Mr. Norsigian don't manage to delay things forever, and that instead we reach a relatively prompt expert consensus. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
