Courtesy of Marian Walton

Lone Pine On Sentinel Dome, Yosemite, 1923

In the beginning, there was just Rick Norsigian, a California man who announced in July that he believed he had purchased “lost negatives” of Ansel Adams for $45 at a garage sale.

His art dealer put the value of the find at $200 million and the story made news around the world.

Then an 87-year-old woman surfaced to say that she had three prints that looked a lot like Norsigian’s images — one was hanging in her bathroom — and they had been shot, she said, not by Adams, but by Earl Brooks, her uncle, who was a little-known photographer.

Now, a granddaughter of Arthur C. Pillsbury, a well-known photographer of the period, says she thinks her grandfather should be added to the list of possible creators of the images of Yosemite park and the Northern California coast that Norsigian bought a decade ago.

(To see large scale photos, go to our photo gallery.)

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster said she was contacted by Norsigian several years ago, had reviewed his images and had found their quality and style reminiscent of her grandfather’s work.

“There was nothing there to suggest that my grandfather wasn’t the photographer,” she said. With the help of a Chicago photograph collector, she says she has since found photos credited to her grandfather that resemble pictures from Norsigian’s collection.

Other candidates may emerge as well, because Yosemite has long been a natural draw for photographers. “It’s hard to know how many” possible photographers were shooting in the park during that period,” said Leroy Radanovich, a photographer and historian of the park, who also mentioned some other possibilities, including Harry Pidgeon, a known Yosemite photographer who traveled with Brooks. “Yosemite is a popular place.”

With so many candidates, competing experts and imperfect authentication techniques, an ironclad answer may prove elusive.

When a panel of art historians and forensic investigators hired by Norsigian declared last summer that the images were certainly the work of Adams, the team relied on several factors, including a handwriting analysis that concluded the sleeves of some of the negatives had writing on them that looked to be that of his wife, Virginia Adams

But since then, one member of Norsigian’s panel has said he believes the identification was wrong and another has downgraded his level of certainty.

The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust has disputed Norsigian’s claim and so has the Center for Creative Photography, the archive at the University of Arizona of which Adams was a co-founder in 1975 and to which he gave much of his work. One of the center’s archivists looked at copies of some of Norsigian’s images years ago and said she did not think they were by Adams. More recently, the center issued a statement that said there was “no reason to believe” they were Adams’ work.

But Norsigian and his lawyer, Arnold Peter, are battling back. This week they released email messages they said they had obtained through a public records request. The emails Peter released indicate that the center only issued the statement critical of Norsigian’s effort after the managing trustee of the Adams trust, William A. Turnage, threatened to end his “34 years of support and assistance” for the center if it did not take a public stand. In earlier messages, center officials had said they hoped to remain neutral.

“In my opinion,” wrote Katherine Martinez, the center’s director, in one of the emails, “CCP staff should not be drawn into debate about the negatives.”

The center declined comment on the messages.

The Center for Creative Photography may have a continuing role in the debate because further forensic testing could require reviewing Adams negatives there.

The case for Brooks as the photographer received a little boost in recent days as his great-grandson Cameron Horne, of Atlanta, came forward with the photographer’s 673-page unpublished memoir, as well as diaries and photo albums. One of the albums contains an image that matches one of Mr. Norsigian’s negatives. In his writing, Brooks also talks about his use of glass negatives, a skill the Norsigian team had said they doubted he possessed.

In his memoir and other materials, Brooks, who died in 1978, depicts himself as an adventurer who grew up in Visalia, Calif., and took to photography and camping in Yosemite at an early age. He became a photo processor during a brief stint at Stanford University and then took it up as a profession when he lived in San Francisco in the early 1920s. He later opened a photo studio in Arden, Del., and tried to sell pictures of Canadian parks to National Geographic.

Pillsbury, for his part, was a lifelong photographer and scientist who owned a photo studio in Yosemite and made thousands of images of the park. After the Norsigian announcement this summer, Pillsbury-Foster said she went back and looked at the negative numbers from the photocopied sleeves that Norsigian had given her years earlier and, she said, they corresponded with missing parts of the Pillsbury collection.

Unless some kind of definitive evidence surfaces, perhaps from forsenic testing of the of Norsigian glass plates, the hunt for additional clues is likely to continue.

Later this week, the Adams trust and Norsigian will face off in federal court where the trust has filed a trademark violation suit because Norsigian has been selling prints of the images, though with a disclaimer that the work is sold “as is,” without trust authentication. Also this month, there is a gallery show in San Francisco where the owner, Scott Nichols, has staged a show of Yosemite photography since the 1860s. Several of the photos that the Brooks family attributes to Earl Brooks — and that Norsigian attributes to Ansel Adams — are included, along with undisputed Adams images.

Nichols said that while it’s possible to recognize the mark of an artist like Adams, many of the images, especially those made around the turn of the 20th century, look similar: luscious black and white prints, often taken from the same spots.

“You might have a signature style that might slightly identify itself,” he said, “but otherwise, yeah, they are a bunch of the same.”