The $274m collection snapped up for $62

Rick Norsigian, a Californian antiques buff, knew exactly what he was looking for at a Fresno garage sale in 2000 - a vintage barber's chair to add to his collection of old telephone switchboards, petrol pumps and aircraft propellers.

But instead he chanced upon something that changed his life: two boxes of antique glass negatives which, a Beverly Hills art appraiser declared yesterday, were the work of Ansel Adams, the father of American photography.

Norsigian had bargained the garage sale holder from US$75 down to US$45 ($62) for the lot.

Now it seems the collection is worth at least US$200 million ($274 million).

Unveiling the photographs at a Beverly Hills gallery yesterday, after years of scepticism from the art world, lawyer Arnold Peter said a team of experts had finally concluded the 65 negatives were the early work of Adams, probably taken between 1919 and the early 1930s and rescued from a fire in 1937.

The photographer declared himself heartbroken at the fire, which destroyed a third of his work.

Adams' black and white pictures of the American West are now a staple of greetings cards and posters. His work not only helped establish photography as an art equivalent to painting or music, but also stoked the nascent national parks movement.

A retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday in 2003 declared him "one of the great photographers of the 20th century and also one of the best-loved spokesmen for the obligations we owe to the natural world".

When Norsigian and his friends noted the similarities between his negatives and Adams' famed photographs of Yosemite National Park, he decided to hire Peter to investigate further, and the pair triumphantly declared the results of that investigation yesterday.

- INDEPENDENT