Some stories in the art world land with a quiet thud and then just keep reverberating. The decision by Danziger Gallery to display — and sell — an AI-colorized version of Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico at this year’s AIPAD Photography Show in New York is one of those stories. It touches something raw about authorship, consent, the art market’s relationship with living artists, and the particular discomfort of watching a technology reshape the legacy of someone who can no longer speak for themselves.
I sat down with Helen Stoilas — former Contributing Editor at The Art Newspaper and current freelance art journalist, who has reported on political and social issues affecting artists and institutions since 2003 — to work through what actually happened and what it means.
What we get into:
We start with the basic facts of the case: a color version of Adams’ most reproduced image, generated by AI, printed in editions and offered for sale at one of the photography world’s most prestigious fairs — without the knowledge of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. The gallery’s defense rests on the image’s public domain status. The Trust’s response was swift and unambiguous, calling it a fundamental issue of artists’ rights, moral rights, and respect for human dignity — arguing that no one should trade on another person’s name, reputation, and labor for private commercial ends without consent and candor.
Then there’s the particular strangeness of the choice of this image and this artist. Adams was a landscape photographer and environmentalist whose photographic practice was deeply entwined with conservation advocacy. An ardent conservationist since adolescence, he served as a director of the Sierra Club from 1934 to 1971 and spent decades lobbying on behalf of wilderness preservation. His black-and-white images weren’t incidentally monochromatic — the tonal range, the drama of light and shadow, the Zone System he developed — all of it was inseparable from his artistic identity and his vision of the natural world. To strip that away with an AI color prompt feels less like transformation and more like a fundamental misreading of what the work was and why it mattered.
We also talk about what this did to the other artists in the booth. At least one of them — Giuseppe Lo Schiavo, whose work was displayed on Danziger’s stand alongside the Moonrise copy — says he was not aware of the AI print before it was shown. That’s not a footnote. That’s a gallery working against its own roster, placing artists in an association they didn’t choose and weren’t given the chance to refuse.
And then there’s the aftermath. Despite the Trust’s formal notice demanding the work be removed, the gallery did not comply — and Danziger subsequently used Adams’ name, the image, and the AIPAD presentation while pursuing a proposed commercial AI colorization venture involving other estates. The controversy, in other words, became a sales pitch.
Helen brings her long experience covering the art market and artist rights to all of this — including where this fits in the broader pattern of AI entering spaces built by and for human artists, and what the art world’s institutions are and aren’t equipped to do about it.
This one is worth your time.
Helen Stoilas’ work appears regularly in The Art Newspaper at theartnewspaper.com – you can view all of her work at helenstoilas.com. You can also listen to her podcast at yourenofun.com. The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust issued its formal statement on May 23.
