The Disputed Legacy of Ansel Adams : Court Case to Examine New Book Featuring Some Works of Famed Photographer

Trustees of the estate of the late photographer Ansel Adams are involved in an increasingly venomous court battle over a new book of photographs drawn from more than 200 images that Adams shot while working for the federal government in World War II.

Adams’ trustees are seeking a court order against promotion of the book, “The Mural Project,” and contend it falsely claims a copyright for the photographs. The two authors and the Santa Barbara publisher of the new volume have counterattacked, claiming that Adams may have improperly retained negatives to the photos in question.

Central to the dispute is the status of hundreds of uncopyrighted, so-called “public-domain” photographs by Adams and other prominent photographers that are held by various U.S. government agencies. For fees of about $10 per picture, virtually anyone can obtain a print of such images and legally publish them.

A Los Angeles federal judge has scheduled a June 19 hearing on a request by the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust and Adams’ longtime publisher, Boston-based Little, Brown & Co., for an injunction against allegedly improper use of Adams’ name in promotion of the book.

The suit, filed Feb. 14, has attracted almost no public attention.

But behind it is a growing reservoir of bitterness.

The negatives are still in Adams’ vault in Carmel Highlands, Calif., according to court filings by the publishing rights trust. Adams died of a heart attack in 1984.

“They (Adams and the publishing rights trust) have been hiding and lying about those negatives for years,” author John Armor charged of the Mural Project pictures in a telephone interview.

In the suit, the Adams trust charges that Santa Barbara-based Day Dream Publishing Inc. and subsidiary, Reverie Press, and the two authors, Peter Wright and Armor, are trying to make a fast profit from Adams’ reputation with a book designed to look like an Adams fine art book published by Little, Brown but filled with prints “of markedly inferior quality.”

“What they are doing is stealing his (Adams’) name and his reputation,” said William Turnage, Adams’ longtime business manager and former head of the Wilderness Society who is one of the four members of the publishing rights trust. Adams’ widow, Virginia Best Adams, is also a member the trust.

“He (Adams) was terribly afraid that, when he died, people would come along and start ripping him off,” Turnage said. “We’re worried not only by the poor quality of this book and what it does to his reputation, but we’re also worried about opening Pandora’s box.

“If you let somebody get away with this, then other people will say, ‘What the hell.’ If they hadn’t been able to put Ansel’s name (on it), they wouldn’t have been able to sell three copies of this book.”

David Vena, a Los Angeles attorney and another Adams trustee, said that while the publishing rights trust has taken legal action against several dozen small publishers who sought to market fraudulent Adams posters, the new case is the first entire book subject to court action.

The photographs directly in dispute date from 1941 and 1942 when Adams worked for the National Park Service, to produce images of park scenes to be blown up mural size for display in government buildings. The mural prints were never executed.

It was during the same period that Adams shot his famous “Moonrise, Hernandez, N.M.” Wright, Armor and their publisher have suggested that “Moonrise” might itself be considered a public domain work that is part of the Mural Project. The government has made no such claim.

Then Interior Secretary Harold Ickes hired Adams for $22.22 a day in salary, plus expenses, government documents obtained by The Times show.

The project is described by Adams in his autobiography, published the year after he died: “It sounded perfect to me--one of the best ideas ever to come out of Washington.” Adams wrote that the effect of the agreement with Ickes was that he would retain ownership of the negatives while prints of the photographs were to be turned over to the government.

A set of prints of the entire collection, signed by Adams, has been in the National Archives in Washington since sometime after World War II. Their existence has never been kept secret by the government, and 15 of the images were published in authorized Adams books. Others were used in a government book 10 years ago.

But about two years ago, Wright and Armor, who were researching a book--subsequently published in 1988--on Adams’ photography of the Manzanar relocation camp, learned of the existence of the Mural Project collection in Adams’ government personnel files.

Wright and Armor have characterized both collections as “virtually unseen” and “all but forgotten.” But officials of the Adams trust and an attorney for the National Archives say such descriptions overstate. Christopher Runkel, a staff attorney at the National Archives, said the characterization “kind of annoyed us.”

After Wright, a photo editor for the Associated Press in Washington, and Armor, an attorney, signed a publication contract with Times Books, a subsidiary of Random House Inc., to publish “Manzanar,” the Adams trust stepped in. The trust obtained an agreement that the cover design and typography of the book would differ from Little, Brown’s standard format for Adams volumes.

But in February of this year, Vena and Turnage said and court documents charge, the Adams trust learned that Wright and Armor intended to issue a second book, on the Mural Project, to be printed from what are called “copy negatives,” photographs taken of photographic prints for the purpose of duplication--necessitated, Wright said, because government records indicated the Mural Project negatives had vanished without a trace. Dave Forgang, curator of the Yosemite National Park museum, said the fate of the negatives had also been of interest to park officials because documents, including a Sept. 30, 1942 letter to Adams from E.K. Burlew, an assistant interior secretary, observe that the negatives “are the property of the United States government.”

Forgang said two letters sent to Adams seeking information on the fate of the negatives went without reply in 1983 and 1984--though one, he said, would have reached Adams just days before his death.

Wright, Armor and Forgang said they did not learn the fate of the negatives until Adams trust court documents disclosed that the negatives were housed in Adams’ vault.

Runkel said a review of the legal status of the Mural Project images led him to conclude that all 226 images in the Archives’ possession are in the public domain. “In our opinion,” said Runkel, “they could be used freely by anyone who wanted to.”

The Adams trust does not dispute the public domain ownership. Court papers indicate that the trust filed its suit because Reverie announced it would also publish wall and personal calendars containing the Adams images. Documents also charge “The Mural Project” was advertised and promoted to erroneously imply the book and calendars were sanctioned by the trust. Little, Brown also publishes its own line of authorized calendars.

The suit charges the book’s copyright notation falsely claims the photographs are included in the copyright for the text. The suit maintains the authors and the publisher improperly used Adams’ name and contends Adams’ reputation could be damaged by what the trust, in court documents, calls poor printing and reproduction.

The injunction request to be heard by U.S. Dist. Court Judge William D. Keller June 19 demands a court order prohibiting advertising statements implying the Mural Project images have not been previously made public.

“These guys are just jackals,” said Vena of the authors and Reverie Press. “If they want to go out and market his name, we’ll try to stop them. That’s exploitation at its worst.”

John Diamond, executive vice president of Day Dream and head of Reverie, said he had received a draft contract from the Book-of-the-Month Club, which, like Little, Brown, is a subsidiary of Time Inc., weeks before the book was published but that the contract offer was rescinded. He charged the decision was made under pressure from Little, Brown.

Book-of-the-Month Club declined to discuss the contract, but a spokeswoman characterized the it as “a delicate situation.” An attorney for Little, Brown said no official contract offer had been made by Book-of-the-Month.

Diamond said “The Mural Project” is selling well. Priced at $34.95, the book, Diamond said, is in its third printing, having sold out two previous printings totaling 70,000 copies. Little, Brown said it does not make public sales figures for any of its books and would not comment on how the claimed sale of “The Mural Project” compares with other Adams properties.

Diamond, a lawyer himself, said the Adams trust and Little, Brown “are incorrect, both in fact and in law,” in their suit.

“I’ve been a great fan of Ansel Adams since I first got into photography,” Wright said. “I remembering sitting in awe of this man. (But) once I got into this collection, I realized the only reason they never put it together and published it as a book was the fact that it was public domain stuff. I don’t see it as greed, (but) the value (of the work) would decrease if any Joe Blow could go to the National Archives and get a print from (Adams’) original negatives.”

Armor compared Little, Brown to “a schoolyard bully using high priced lawyers for fists.”

Diamond and Wright said still more Adams photographs have been located in the collections of private corporations for which Adams once did free-lance commercial photography. Both men said a third Adams book is under development, but they would not discuss its subject matter. Some additional Adams images are in the National Archives and Library of Congress.

Vena said the case may eventually bring pressure on Congress to redefine laws governing how publicly owned artworks may be used. Adams is not the only famous photographer whose work is in government hands. The Library of Congress has custody of a large collection of pictures taken during the Depression for the Farm Security Administration, including images by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.

Vena said a variety of papers show that Adams’ negatives were properly kept by him. “There are other documents” aside from the limited number introduced by Wright and Armor, Vena said. “It is our position that the negatives were not government property.” But more important, he said, the dispute raises a larger issue.

“There is some question in my mind whether the National Archives is abusing a trust in making this work available for commercial reproduction in a manner in which (the pictures weren’t intended,)” he said. “I think one of the possibilities is the introduction of federal legislation to preclude work like this from being used by unrelated people for personal profit and gain.”