"Missing Link"

$200 Million Ansel Adams Negatives Found at Garage Sale

Many questions, but foremost in my mind is: How did someone as obsessive as Ansel Adams lose something like this?

UPDATED 28Jul10, 0947: Oops.

Alleged Adams negatives, bought at garage sale, in dispute

The "balloon boy" of photography. It's always easy to turn against the party making the outrageous claim, but this one seems a bit more authenticated than most. Like I said earlier, I find it hard to believe that Ansel (see, we're on a first-name basis) would misplace negatives. But who knows? Maybe he was too emotionally overwhelmed to rummage through the ashes of his studio.

I take issue with a couple of paragraphs from the WaPo article:

"Adams is renowned for his timeless black-and-white photographs of the American West, which were produced with darkroom techniques that heightened shadows and contrasts to create mood-filled landscape portraits."

Um. Well. Yes. And Abraham Lincoln is remembered for his conflict-resolution skills.

"His photographs today are widely reproduced on calendars, on posters and in coffee-table books, while his prints are coveted by collectors."

Right. You know, Ansel Adams, that guy who took the photo that's hanging in your cubicle.

Art photographers tend to roll their eyes at the mention of Ansel's name, and I think that's a damned shame. I don't particularly enjoy his work (certain exceptions to that, see below) but what I do would not be possible without him. He was the Beatles of photography.

And, like the Beatles, he is now more a brand than a memory, the collective property of those who have only a tangential knowledge of photography, yet present themselves as seeped in the culture of art. That's why we snooty art types roll our eyes--when people say they love Ansel Adams, it usually means they love the coffee table book they bought at the Barnes & Noble bargain table.

But, here is an excerpt from The Negative. I bought it at the used book store, and a scrawled inscription in the front, dated from 1988, reads: "Dear Mom, Happy Mother's Day! Just a little extra help for you when you take my picture. Love, Peter." Anyway, here is what Adams says about Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico:

I came across this extraordinary scene when returning to Santa Fe from an excursion to the Chama Valley. The sun was edging a fast-moving bank of clouds in the west. I set up the 8x10 camera as fast as I could while visualizing the image. I had to exchange the front and back elements of my Cooke lens, attaching the 23-inch element in front, with a glass G filter (#15) behind the shutter. I focused and composed the image rapidly at full aperture, but I knew that because of the focus-shift of the single lens component, I had to advance the focus about 3/32 of an inch when I used f/32 . . . Then, to my dismay, I could not find my exposure meter! I remembered that the luminance of the moon at that position was about 250 c/ft^2, placing this luminance on Zone VII, I could calculate that 60 c/ft^2 would fall on Zone V. With a film of ASA 64, the exposure would be 1/60 of a second at f/8. Allowing a 3x exposure factor for the filter, the basic exposure was 1/20 of a second at f/8, or about one second at f/32 . . .


Like it or not, the man was a genius. As Stephen King said about Larry Niven, "we proceed down a path marked by his ideas."

Still, I am a miserly SOB, and I would not have bought The Negative if not for the child's Mother's Day inscription. It's not hard to imagine that Peter was signing a book bought for him by his father, and that his mother had hinted that she could use volume two of the Adams trilogy. The Negative is not exactly an impulse buy. In 1988, film was still very much alive, but the idea that mom would need the Zone System to take pictures of her small child is either very ironic, or very inspiring.

If she was indeed dragging out the 8x10 to photograph Peter, I'd call that inspiring. If she was like most normal people, and used a point-and-shoot from K-Mart, I think the irony is that our casual photography wouldn't have grown if the ground hadn't first been broken by Ansel Adams.