Adams, a member of the famed Group f/64, is best known for his images of the American West, whose vast forests and mountains he photographed in sleek black and white. On its stock photography website Adobe Stock, the company was selling pictures produced using generative AI that recalled Adams’s work, albeit with noticeable differences.

In one picture that has since been deleted from Adobe Stock, a cloud rolls into a valley, cascading above a serene river—seemingly a reference to actual works that Adams shot in the ’30s.

But unlike Adams’s photography, which is rich in detail, this image appears clearly digital, with darkened mountains and flat-looking trees. That image, made available under the title “Nature’s Symphony: Ansel Adams-Style Photography – AI-Generated,” could be bought under extended license for $79.99.

According to Adobe Stock’s terms of use, users are not allowed to upload AI-generated pictures “created using prompts containing other artist names, or created using prompts otherwise intended to copy another artist.”

“You are officially on our last nerve with this behavior,” the Ansel Adams Trust wrote on Threads on Friday, receiving more than 2,800 likes on the post.

“Thank you for flagging as this goes against our Generative AI content policy,” Adobe wrote back the next day. “We’re glad our team was able to remove the content.”

But the debate did not end there. In reply, the trust wrote, “Thanks @adobe but we’ve been in touch directly multiple times beginning in Aug 2023. Assuming you want to be taken seriously re: your purported commitment to ethical, responsible AI, while demonstrating respect for the creative community, we invite you to become proactive about complaints like ours, & to stop putting the onus on individual artists/artists’ estates to continuously police our IP on your platform, on your terms. It’s past time to stop wasting resources that don’t belong to you.”

Adobe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Adams doing his thing around 1947 in a photograph by J. Malcolm Greany.

VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Earlier this week the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior posted a job listing on USAJOBS looking for a photographer to take large format black-and-white documentary photographs of American National Parks for the Library of Congress.

Yes, that is pretty much the job that Ansel Adams had in the early 1940s.

The position carries a salary of up to $100,000 a year and includes quite a bit of travel—around 5 to 10 days a month on average, as PetaPixel, which tipped us off to the news, reported.

The position continues the late, great nature photographer’s many years of work spent documenting the nation’s varied flora and fauna. The job will also involve developing photographic guidelines and standards, evaluating photographic submissions, and making presentations about the photo collection.

Applications for the position are due next Tuesday, December 15.

Archeologist Howard Carter in King Tut’s tomb.

COURTESY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The Williams College Museum of Art will receive 68 artworks from Peter Norton of antivirus software fame. The gift includes works from Tracey Emin, Adrian Piper, Allan Ruppersberg, Nayland Blake, and Christopher Wool. [Artforum]

Shannon Stratton, current executive director of contemporary arts nonprofit Threewalls in Chicago (which she founded), will take over as chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design. [Artforum]

President of Condé Nast publishers, Nicholas Coleridge, has been appointed the new chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He will succeed Paul Ruddock in November. [The Art Newspaper]

Goutam Ghosh’s “…ascribing to them birth, animation, sense and accident …” at STANDARD (OSLO). [Contemporary Art Daily]

Holland Cotter’s review of cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa’s retrospective at El Museo del Barrio. [The New York Times]

Online collectors site Artsy has accrued $25 million in funding on their sixth investment round. The investment, led by private-equity firm Catterton, raises the company’s total financing to $50.8 million. [Crain’s New York]

For their iPhone 6 campaign, Apple crowdsourced photos taken on an iPhone 6 to use on billboard advertisements. The goal was to suggest that “anyone with [Apple’s] new smartphone can be a Cartier-Bresson or an Ansel Adams,” according to the SF Gate. In response, two local men decided to display average-looking selfies next to the ads in an act of “guerrilla art.” [SF Gate]

King Tutankhamen/Tut’s chair was broken as it traveled from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square to the Grand Egyptian Museum in al-Haram of Giza. [The Cairo Post]

Artist Oscar Santillan was accused of vandalism after he cut off the top of Scafell Pike’s 3,209ft-tall Lake District peak for an exhibition in London. The mountain remains England’s highest. [The Telegraph]

Georgia O’Keeffe, Heliconia—Crab Claw, 1939, oil on canvas.

COURTESY ©GEORGIA O’KEEFFE MUSEUM/COLLECTION OF SHARON AND THURSTON TWIGG-SMITH

Adams trained his lens on conventional landmarks—Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa—but he also found a wealth of new and unexpected subjects: cruise ships and freighters, Buddhist graves, TV antennae, workers, helicopters, and schoolchildren. O’Keeffe, not surprisingly, gravitated to the islands’ exotic flora and dramatic scenery. Her close-ups of flowers—birds of paradise, heliconia, lotuses—are characteristically sensuous, while her paintings of waterfalls succeed in conveying the majesty of the Hawaiian landscape. Adams’s black-and-white shots, though beautifully composed, just can’t compete. For the most part, the curators avoid the temptation to compare and contrast, but one gallery does focus on the two artists’ fascination with lava, O’Keeffe memorializing a natural black lava bridge in choppy brushwork, Adams reveling in the surreal topography of a hardened flow.

Striking a slightly discordant note are Dole’s final ads featuring O’Keeffe’s images. Reproduced in the primitive color of the times, these are sadly flat abstractions, possibly not what the company had in mind to hype the products of paradise.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 100.

Mandel’s portrait of Richard Diebenkorn shot for ARTnews, 1956.

ROSE MANDEL ARCHIVE, OAKLAND. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Burgard explains that when the ARTnews story, written by Herschel B. Chipp, came out, one collector was so angry that he called the artist and furiously demanded, “What have you done to the value of my paintings?” Wholly lost in the controversy was the photographer, who took pictures for the story over a two-week period. Mandel’s photos captured the paint-spattered artist in his new Berkeley Hills studio.

Chipp described what Mandel recorded as a “prolonged struggle with the various images [Diebenkorn] produced” in the course of completing one painting. In one of her final photographs, Mandel seems to have borrowed a compositional strategy from Diebenkorn himself, framing his shadowy head and shoulders in the foreground next to a sunny window with a plant. The canvas, in the near distance, offers another kind of window, of the sort that figured in several of Diebenkorn’s Berkeley paintings.

The Errand of the Eye, #23, 1952.

©ROSE MANDEL ARCHIVE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO, PROMISED GIFT FROM AN ANONYMOUS DONOR

Mandel, who received no credit for the photos, had three years earlier, in 1954, enjoyed a solo show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor that earned high praise from local critics. Titled “Errand of the Eye,” after an Emily Dickinson poem, it featured close-up studies that move in and out of focus, lyrically describing branches, twigs, tendrils, and weeds. Images from that exhibition became part of a larger celebration six months later of Bay Area photographers at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Mandel showed infrequently over the next 20 years, but she left an impressive body of images before she stopped working in 1972. A show of some 80 of her works, also called “Errand of the Eye,” will run concurrent with Diebenkorn’s Berkeley paintings exhibition at the de Young.

An émigré from war-torn Poland, Mandel made her way with her husband, Arthur, to the Bay Area in the mid-1940s. Although trained in child psychology, she was not sufficiently fluent in English to qualify for a teaching job at the time and worked briefly as a lathe operator. In 1946, after her husband left her for a younger woman, she enrolled in art courses at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where she quickly impressed such luminaries as Edward Weston, Minor White, and Ansel Adams. “She would tell me, ‘Ansel Adams saved my life by showing me how to view the world through the lens of a camera,’” says Susan Ehrens, a longtime friend and author of a catalogue essay on Mandel. The photos in the de Young show include playful and hallucinatory visions of San Francisco shop windows, moody portraits of such artists as Jay DeFeo and William Theophilus Brown, and evocative studies of the shoreline and raging waters of the California coast.

Mandel’s Jay DeFeo, ca. 1949.

©ROSE MANDEL ARCHIVE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THE JAY DEFEO TRUST, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

Julian Cox, co-curator of the exhibition, believes Mandel did not become better known because “she was a very private person, very modest by nature, and she really created her greatest work before there was such a thing as an art market for photography. She had an income as a teacher and never sought a larger reputation.” After receiving a Guggenheim fellowship in 1967, which was about 10 years after she and Arthur remarried, she stopped taking photographs. As Ehrens explains, “He’s been described to me as a control freak and a bully.” She adds, “I think at some point she quit because it was easier for her not to photograph and to totally devote herself to him. She died a mystery to me because she would never talk about the past.”

Mandel’s last group of landscapes, made in the ’60s, verge on pure abstraction and depend on complicated spatial arrangements; many feature roiling waves and turbulent waters. For Ehrens, they “reflect the turmoil not only of what was going on in our country, but the turmoil she was feeling in her homelife. It took a lot of inner strength for her to create the bodies of work that she did during the decades that she worked.”

Richard Muffley’s photo of Rose Mandel at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1954.

ROSE MANDEL ARCHIVE, OAKLAND

William Wegman, Fay and Andrea, 1987.

 COURTESY THE ARTIST

The author’s fascination with his subject began when, as a teenager in the 1980s, he bought one of the early, five-pound models from the ’50s. When that camera was made, the company’s visionary founder, Edwin Land, had already hit it off with Ansel Adams, and Land enlisted the photographer as a consultant in 1949 for $100 a month. Adams often shot on Type 55 film, which produced both a print and a reusable large-format negative. He captured one of his favorite images with a Polaroid: El Capitan, Sunrise, Winter, Yosemite National Park, California, 1968.

Lucas Samaras, Photo-Transformation, June 13, 1974.

ELLEN LABENSKI/©LUCAS SAMARAS/COURTESY THE PACE GALLERY, NEW YORK, LONDON, BEIJING

Adams talked up the brand to his art-world connections, and many other luminaries started experimenting with the technology. Bert Stern, for one, made Polaroid portraits of Louis Armstrong and Salvador Dalí. “The intimacy of the technology—point, shoot, and print— allowed experimentation, and that was also part of its draw,” Bonanos says.

A double portrait of Andy Warhol by Bill Ray, 1980.

©BILL RAY

Chuck Close used the gargantuan 20×24 model to take incredibly sharp pictures of sections of his own face—every pore visible—which he then stitched together to create one big portrait in 1979. (He later photographed Barack Obama with a 20×24.) Andy Warhol also dallied with the phone-booth-size camera, but far more often he wielded a handheld plastic Big Shot, bringing it to parties, art openings, and museums, accumulating the photos that informed his silk- screens. David Hockney played with perspective in his photocollages, such as Sun on the Pool Los Angeles April 13th 1982, in a way that would have been nearly impossible had his Polaroid not freed him up to instantly reshoot any crooked edges.

Patrick Nagatani, d’Alamogordo Blues, 1986.

COURTESY THE WESTLICHT COLLECTION, VIENNA

In 1972, Polaroid introduced its most familiar format, the SX-70, with the white tab at the bottom of the frame. Walker Evans bought one, thinking it would be a fun toy, but then embraced it as a serious medium for shooting Americana. And Lucas Samaras had used Polaroid film for years before he famously began pressing on the surface of his SX-70 prints—the gelatin-based emulsion stayed wet under the Mylar cover for hours—to create distorted and disturbing images. “This kind of manipulation,” says Bonanos, “wasn’t seen again until the advent of Photoshop.”

David Levinthal, from the series “American Beauties,” 1989-90.

©DAVID LEVINTHAL

Indeed, Polaroid’s innovation of the instant picture wasn’t only groundbreaking in its own time; it laid the foundation for how we relate to photography today. Bonanos details how, in a 1970 speech outside Boston, Land predicted that one day we would use a camera like a “telephone.” It would become, the inventor said, “something that was always with you.”

Chuck Close, Self-Portrait/ Composite/ Nine Parts, 1979.

©CHUCK CLOSE/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND THE PACE GALLERY, NEW YORK,LONDON, BEIJING

Pierre Dubreuil's The First Round, ca. 1932, sold for $314,500 at Sotheby's

COURTESY OF SOTHEBY'S

NEW YORK—Fall photography sales fell roughly in line with totals seen last year as collectors continue to emphasize top-quality works by blue chip artists from across the spectrum of 19th to 20th century, vintage works to modern and contemporary prints. The total at Phillips de Pury & Company, Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales from Oct. 4-6 was $17.5 million, compared with $17.4 million realized last year.

Phillips accounted for $6.9 million of that total, an improvement on last year’s total of just under $4 million, while Sotheby’s realized $4.7 million, as compared with $4.97 million last year. Christie’s total was $5.8 million, compared with $8.5 million achieved last year. In addition to its various owner sale on Oct. 6, Christie’s held a separate single-owner auction, titled “The American Landscape,” featuring black and white photographs from the collection of Bruce and Nancy Berman on Oct. 7. The sale realized $1 million, compared with an estimate of $900,000/1.3 million.

Phillips opened the series on Oct. 4, with a regular various-owner sale as well as a special offering of works from an unidentified private collection, titled “The Arc of Photography,” that collectively took in $6.9 million compared with an estimate of $4.5 million/6.5 million.

Both sales were heavy with established names such as Richard Avedon, Man Ray, Irving Penn, Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Mapplethorpe. Of 272 lots on offer, 224 lots, or 82 percent, were sold. By value, the sale realized 91 percent.

The top lot was Avedon’s portfolio of The Beatles, 1967, which sold for $722,500 compared with an estimate of $350,000/450,000.The second-highest price was paid for a work from the private collection by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix) and Adrien Tournachon, Pierrot with Fruit, 1854-55. It brought a record $542,500 compared with an estimate of $150,000/200,000.

Man Ray’s Untitled (Self-portrait of Man Ray), 1933, sold for $398,500 compared with an estimate of $80,000/120,000 while Penn’s Black and White Vogue Cover (Jean Patchett), New York, 1950, sold for $374,500.

Stieglitz’s portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1935, also featured in the top prices, selling for $146,500, and falling within the $120,000/180,000 estimate. Among more contemporary works, Candida Höfer’s Handelingenkamer Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal Den Haag III, 2004, sold for $104,500 compared with an estimate of $50,000/70,000, while Mapplethorpe’s Calla Lily, 1987, sold for $86,500, clearing the $50,000/70,000 estimate.

Vanessa Kramer, worldwide director of photographs at Phillips, said the results “mirror the strength of the photographs market across the spectrum as well as the increase in demand for the highest caliber of works,” adding that the sales “speak of the steadfast growth of the field.”

Sotheby’s sale on Oct. 5 saw solid results with the house posting a total of $4.7 million, falling within the $3.6 million/5.5 million estimate. Of 193 lots offered, 138 (or 72 percent) were sold.

The top lot was a complete set of Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly, a journal that was published by Stieglitz from 1903-17. Estimated at $200,000/250,000, the set sold for $398,500 to Christian Keesee, according to Christie’s.

The sale posted two artist records: for Pierre Dubreuil, when his oil print, The First Round, ca. 1932, sold for $314,500 compared with an estimate of $150,000/250,000; and for Alexander Gardner et alii when the sketchbook, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, sold for $158,500 on an estimate of $70,000/100,000. In the top lots, Gardner’s Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, 1863, sold for $98,500 on an estimate of $30,000/50,000.

Christopher Mahoney, senior vice president of Sotheby’s photographs department said that the wide range of material in the top lots “demonstrates the richness and depth of the market.”

Chelsea dealer Bruce Silverstein was listed as the buyer of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s gum-platinum print, The Cloud, 1906, which was estimated at $20,000/30,000 but sold for three times that, at $92,500.

At Christie’s sale on Oct. 6, 294 lots were offered and 214, or 73 percent, were sold. By value, the auction realized 83 percent.

Deborah Bell, Christie’s specialist head of the photo department, said the sale “offered a wide range of photographs that stimulated active bidding across all categories. The top-two prices achieved for works by Ansel Adams and Vik Muniz demonstrate the strength and sweeping diversity of the market for photographs.”

The top price was $242,500 for a group of works by Adams titled Clearing Storm, Sonoma County Hills, 1951, made up of five gelatin silver print enlargements, flush-mounted on plywood. It was estimated at $200,000/300,000.

It was followed by Muniz’s The Best of Life, 1989-1995, ten gelatin silver prints of iconic historical images from Life magazine, which sold for $170,500 clearing the $80,000/120,000 estimate.

Two other lots by Adams figured in the top ten, with both selling to U.S. dealers. These included: Surf Sequence, A-E, 1940, five gelatin silver prints printed in the 1960s, that sold for $170,500 against an estimate of $100,000/150,000; and Aspens, Northern New Mexico, 1958, a gelatin silver mural print, printed in 1965-1968.

A mixed-media gelatin print by Peter Beard, Bull Eland Passing Elephants Digging Water, near Kathamula Tsavo, North, for The End of the Game, February 1965, sold for $158,500 (estimate: $80,000/120,000).

Work by Robert Frank also figured prominently in the auction’s top lots. The highest of these was London, 1951, a gelatin silver print, printed late 1970s, which sold for $116,500 on an estimate of $90,000/120,000. Two other works by Frank took $98,500 each, against estimates of $100,000/150,000, including Charleston, S.C., 1956, a gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1970, and Fourth of July-Jay, New York, 1956, a gelatin silver print also printed ca. 1970.

William Eggleston’s Sumner, Mississippi, ca. 1970, a dye-transfer print, printed 2001, sold for $104,500 on an estimate of $30,000/50,000, and Frantisek Drtikol’s Svítání, 1928-1929, a flush-mounted pigment print, also sold for $104,500 on an estimate of $40,000/60,000.

After a seven-month legal dispute, the Ansel Adams Publishing Trust reached a settlement on Monday with Fresno, Calif., resident Rick Norsigian. While Norsigian is legally permitted to continue selling prints and posters through his website, which he calls “The Lost Negatives,” he is now officially forbidden to use Ansel Adams’s name or likeness. Norsigian is required to post a disclaimer prepared by the Adams Trust stating, “Merchandise sold through this website, including but not limited to darkroom/digital prints or posters, is sold as is with no representation or warranty of authenticity as a work of Ansel Adams.”

The trust sued Norsigian last August, taking action against his claims that a batch of 65 glass-plate negatives—purchased 10 years ago for $45 at a garage sale—were shot by the famed nature photographer. Through his website, Norsigian had begun capitalizing on the Adams name by selling prints (priced at $1,500–7,500) made from the negatives. On Dec. 28, 2010, Norsigian and PRS Media Partners filed a counterclaim against the Adams Trust.

While disputing Norsigian’s claims, the Adams Trust had little counterevidence until July 29, 2010, when Oakland resident Mariam Walton saw Norsigian on TV attributing a print to Adams that she recognized as nearly identical to one by her uncle, photographer Earl Brooks. Like Adams, Brooks worked in Yosemite and on the California coast in the 1920s and ’30s. The Earl Brooks theory bred further doubt about the origins of the negatives.

Those familiar with Adams’s work have long questioned Norsigian’s assertion, leading him to hire experts to “affirm” their authenticity. At one point his team estimated the collection’s value at $200 million. The specialists Norsigian consulted included a handwriting expert and a former FBI agent, but no historians or scholars of photography.

Ansel’s grandson Matthew Adams, along with Adams’s former business manager, William Turnage, took issue with the proclaimed worth of the glass plates. The L.A. Times reported last summer that because the original artist printed just 1,500 photographs total, his grandson and Turnage say the value of the work lies in signed vintage prints. Furthermore, the Adams archive at the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona has almost 45,000 glass plate negatives, so the discovery of 65 isn’t ground-breaking, regardless of their authenticity.

Ramon J. Muxter, right, held his camera at arm's length to take William Burroughs and Me, Self-Portrait with William Burroughs, Spring Street Bar, New York, 1976.

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS PHOTOGRAPHY GRANT AND THE KATE AND HALL J. PETERSON FUND

Henri Cartier-Bresson took thousands of pictures during his long career, but he was notoriously camera shy. Edward Steichen had painterly aspirations and made early self-portraits as a Baudelairean dandy wielding a palette and brush. Robert Mapple­thorpe liked to take photos of his own mesmerizing gaze. Those are a few of the revelations to emerge from “Facing the Lens: Portraits of Photographers,” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

“Originally we thought of doing portraits of artists in general,” says Christian ­Peterson, associate curator of photography and the ­organizer of the show, which runs through August 28. “Then I realized that a lot of the works are of photog­raphers, either self-portraits or photos made by other photographers.”

Spanning the years 1887 to 2003—much of the history of the medium—”Facing the Lens” includes about 75 works, drawn largely from the museum’s collection. A portrait of Edward Weston by Ansel Adams shows the former looking like a tree toad or a humanoid outgrowth at the base of a giant eucalyptus tree. “Wes­ton was a fairly short man, and to put him in front of a big tree makes him look particularly small,” says Peterson, though the curator believes no malice was intended. Cartier-Bresson, captured against a brick wall by Arnold Newman, looks poised to flee the decisive moment at any second. And ­Eadweard Muybridge, famed for his series of motion studies, did one of his own naked self throwing the discus, walking, and going up and down steps. “This photo is part of a group that shows multiple images of a subject,” says Peterson, “which makes the point that, of course, we all know a single portrait of any individual can in no way sum up his or her entirety.”

One of the most spontaneous images is by a local Minneapolis legend, Ramon J. Muxter, who “was a really gonzo crazy street photographer,” says the curator. “When he ran into well-known people in New York City, he would hold the camera out at arm’s length and take a self-portrait” with them. Muxter’s photo of himself and William Burroughs shows them at the Spring Street Bar in an uneasy embrace, eyes shut tight.

Sometimes the style of the subject’s work asserts itself even when other photographers are behind the camera. Alec Soth’s 2000 study of a rumpled William Eggleston hunched over a keyboard looks a lot like… a William Eggleston.

In this, his first New York solo in a decade, Neil Jenney presented 17 major oil-on-wood paintings from the past 12 years. The brilliant land- and skyscapes on view, mostly long and narrow horizontals, are all encased within the artist’s trademark heavy black wood frames, which he designs and often embellishes with the work’s title in a block-letter caption below the image. In North America Divided (2001-02, approximately 26 by 28 inches), the initials N above A are stenciled in gray. The frame ensconces a small, delicately wrought scene of a rock wall spanning the middle of a grassy field, with a felled tree and a broken wood beam at the center suggesting a violent act of human and/or natural origin. Thematically, the painting typifies Jenney’s longtime focus on environmental concerns. Newer developments in the paintings on view unfold slowly, more in terms of refinements in technique and format than dramatic breakthroughs.

The Connecticut-born artist, whose roots lie in installation art and post-Minimal abstraction, came to prominence in the mid 1970s with the emergence of what curator Marcia Tucker would baptize “Bad Painting.” His faux-naive studies of people and objects were prescient of the Neo-Expressionist movement and instrumental in reestablishing figurative painting as a serious art form. Inspired by the 19th-century Hudson River School, Jenney eventually arrived at his own form of visionary landscape, using intricate brushwork and high-key tones to convey rarified spaces and a dense atmosphere. Two of the exhibition’s highlights were from his long-running “Atmosphere” series. Painted with more than a dash of humor, Atmospheric Formation (2005) is a luscious skyscape that hints at a fable, as wispy white and purple clouds in the shapes of tortoises and hares float across the dazzling blue expanse.

The most recent paintings conjure global warming. They feature a glowing tropical forest, based on Florida vegetation, as if seen through the slats of window blinds. In the radiant North American Vegetae #4 (2007-08, about 24 by 68 inches), for instance, the composition of palm fronds and vines is extremely compressed as the unadorned black wood framing the narrow composition is proportionally larger than in most earlier pieces. Where once Jenney’s frames recalled those preferred by Dutch old masters, they now appear as ominous encasements, as if a forest fragment were kept alive inside a hermetically sealed container, into which viewers are afforded barely a glimpse.