At a sale at a private home in California several years ago, a man purchased a box of photographic negatives stored in envelopes (negatives are photographic images on film or glass from which actual photographs can be made). The negatives dated from the 1920s and showed landscape scenes of the western United States. While the negatives carried no indication of the name of the photographer who created them, some people have concluded that the negatives were in fact made by the landscape photographer Ansel Adams, one of the greatest American photographers of the twentieth century. Several arguments have been offered in support of this idea.

First, the negatives include images of landscape features that Ansel Adams is known to have photographed. One of the negatives shows a large pine tree leaning downward on a cliff. The same distinctively shaped tree appears in another photograph that, without a doubt, was taken by Adams in the 1920s.

Second, the envelopes holding the negatives are numbered and marked with handwritten place names. The handwriting on the envelopes seems to resemble the handwriting of Virginia Adams, Ansel Adams' wife. Virginia Adams is known to have assisted her husband in his work, so those who believe that Ansel Adams created these negatives have concluded that she helped her husband organize these negatives by numbering them and recording the names of the places where the images were created.

Third, a number of the negatives have been damaged by fire. It is well known that Ansel Adams' photography studio had a fire that destroyed or damaged nearly a third of his negatives. The fact that some of the negatives bought at the sale have fire damage is consistent with the idea that they once belonged to Ansel Adams.