Once in a while you stumble upon stories that seem almost too good to be true. This is one such story. And at the center of it all is the grand master of landscape photography himself, the legendary American photographer Ansel Adams.

It all started in a small garage in Fresno, Southern California in year 2000. Rick Norsigian was attending a garage sale looking for antiques when he noticed two old boxes in the garage. He opened them and pulled out some old glass negatives with black and white landscape photographs.

“As a young man, I worked at Yosemite quite a bit. So, right away I recognized it as Yosemite” Norsigian said.

He decided to buy the glass negatives and started negotiating with the seller, finally negotiating the price down from US$70 to US$45 for the two boxes. The owner told Norsigian he had bought them in the 1940s at a warehouse salvage in Los Angeles.

In Glacier National Park, Montana. Photo by Ansel Adams.

Rick Norsigian kept the two old boxes under his pool table for two years before he realized the photos may be Ansel Adams photographs. This is when he started doing some more research. After four years he had done enough research to realize the plates could be valuable, so he decided to move them from under his pool table and placed them in a bank vault.

This proved to be a very wise decision.

Now the glass negatives have been authenticated and are valued at $US200 million, Norsigian has told a press conference.

Several experts, including a former FBI agent and a U.S. attorney, “came to the conclusion that, based on the evidence which was overwhelming, that no reasonable person would have any doubt that these, in fact, were the long-lost images of Ansel Adams,” Arnold Peter said, the lawyer who led the effort to authenticate that the negatives were made by the man known as the father of American photography.

Michael Nattenberg and Marcel Matley, two independent handwriting experts have stated that handwriting on the envelopes in which the negatives were found belonged to Adams’s wife, Virginia.

George Wright, a meteorological expert, has concluded that one of the pictures found in the Norsigian negatives was taken on the same day and time as one of Adams’s more famous images.

Evening, McDonald Lake, Glacier National Park. Photo by Ansel Adams.

Ansel Adams died in 1984, and was believed to have lost many of his negatives in a 1937 darkroom fire. It is estimate that the blaze destroyed as many as 5,000 negatives, and many of the negatives had never been developed into photographs.

Ansel Adams was one of the foremost nature photographers of his era, known for his images of the American west, especially Yosemite National Park.

Norsigian, who is 64, still works for the Fresno school system, but may retire this year putting a family high on the list of priorities after the valuation of his garage sale buy.

He’s not spoken with the man who sold him the two boxes a decade ago.

“If he’s still around, I’m afraid he may come looking for me” Norsigian said in an interview with CNN.

Books by Ansel Adams

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