Though he died more than 25 years ago, Ansel Adams’ name has been all over the news this week thanks to a lucky garage sale find.
Ten years ago, construction worker Rick Norsigian was doing some garage sailing in his hometown of Fresno, California. Though shopping for an antique barber chair, he was drawn to a 6.5 x 8.5 glass photographic plate with an image of Yosemite. After some negotiation, he bought a box of 64 such plates for $45.
Upon seeing them, family and friends joked that maybe they once belonged to Ansel Adams. Norsigian laughed along with them, but there were some striking similarities between the plates before him and what he knew of Adams’ work. Norisigian started researching.
Ansel Adams, born in San Francisco in 1902, became known for his black-and-white landscape images of the unspoilt American West—particularly of Yosemite National Park. He first visited Yosemite in 1916, around the same time he received his first Kodak Brownie box camera. He met his wife in Yosemite on a subsequent trip, and would return there every year until his death in 1984.
Adams initially sought to be a concert pianist before photography slowly took over his life. Though now considered one of America’s greatest ever photographers, for much of his career, Adams had trouble making ends meet. At times he relied on commercial photo work in New York to earn a living, and often depended on the National Park Service to fund his forays into the American wilderness. He didn’t limit himself to Yosemite and the High Sierra, but captured the natural beauty of New Mexico, Death Valley, Hawaii, Yellowstone, and the Tetons.
A member of the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, he was active in environmental causes throughout his life. In addition to his environmental work, he authored ten highly influential volumes on the technical aspects of photography.
In 1977, his photograph of the Snake River was selected as one of the 116 images to be launched into orbit on the Voyager space craft’s Golden Record, a document meant to educate any aliens who might come upon it about life here on Earth. In 1980, Jimmy Carter awarded him the Congressional Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.
And those plates that Rick Norsigian found at the garage sale? It took nearly ten years for experts to agree that they were, in fact, lost plates once belonging to Ansel Adams.
Earlier this week, appraiser David Street estimated their worth at $200 million.
Expect big crowds at garage sales across the country this weekend.
