KTVU.com

An image taken at Yosemite's famous Jeffrey Pine resembles Uncle Earl's photo [The spelling Earle is in KTVU's graphic]

For over a decade, Rick Norsigian has been trying to prove that a box of glass-plate negatives he bought at a yard sale are the work of Ansel Adams.

This week, he agreed to a confidential settlement with the Ansel Adams Publishing Right Trust barring him from selling prints of the negatives under the Adams name. His website, which once trumpeted a report declaring the work to be authentically Adams, has now been scrubbed of almost every mention of the famed photographer. The prints, once priced at up to $7,500 a piece, currently cost no more than $960.

Reached over the phone, his son John Norsigian called the situation "unfortunate" and "stressful."

But Norsigian has no plans to give up his quest.

“The authentication will go forward,” he said, “I’m not ever going to quit.”

It's unclear what that authentication effort now means with the settlement in place. Any attempt to sell prints with the name "Ansel Adams," it appears, would be met with a trademark challenge from the Adams Trust. (The original value that Norsigian's appraiser offered, $200 million, hinged on sale of the prints as well as the potential value of negatives themselves.) But Norsigian did hint that there were forensic details that might show the negatives in a new light — they are, in his estimation, "a piece of history."

From the beginning, the Adams trust disputed that Adams was the photographer in the strongest terms —managing trustee William Turnage likened the authentication effort to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels "big lie" technique—but the legal action began when the trust filed a trademark infringement suit in federal court in San Francisco in August. In January, Mr. Norsigian’s team added the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, which houses Adams’ archives, as a party to their countersuit against the Trust.

Emails obtained by Norsigian through a public records request showed that Turnage had lobbied the archive to make a statement disputing Norsigian’s authentication claims, which the archive eventually did.

The Center for Creative Photography was not named in the press release about the settlement, but the Federal Court in San Francisco is due to rule on their motion to dismiss in late April.

The authentication effort was hampered from the beginning by the emergence of Earl Brooks. An Oakland woman, Marian Walton, produced a photo she said was taken by her "Uncle Earl" which seemed to match one of the negatives — a shot of the Jeffrey Pine in Yosemite.

This fall, The Bay Citizen announced that another seemingly matching photo of Yosemite was found in a photo scrapbook belonging to Brooks' great grandson. No word from Earl Brooks' family about settlement agreement; one legal chapter might have closed, but many questions remain.

For an interactive on the Adams photo mystery, go here.