Ansel Adams, a Colorized 'Moonrise' by AI for Sale at $10,000: Heirs Oppose
Over the weekend, the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust issued a statement on Instagram condemning the Danziger Gallery in New York for displaying and offering for sale an AI-generated version of "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico." The work was presented last April at The Photography Show, the fair organized by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, and fits into recent cases where works by identifiable artists are reworked by generative models for explicitly commercial purposes.
The piece is still visible on the Danziger Gallery's website. The label identifies it as "A.I. GENERATED, From the prompt: Make a realistic color version of Ansel Adams' iconic 'Moonrise Over Hernandez'" and indicates that the print was produced by master printer Esteban Mauchi. The price at the fair was $10,000, according to testimonies gathered from the photographic community present at the event. The AI model used has not been disclosed; the generation and retouching iterations were completed on April 26, the last day of the exhibit.
Trust's Position
The Trust claims it was not consulted or notified. Once it became aware of the exhibition, it directly contacted James Danziger requesting the removal of the work. The request was denied. According to correspondence shared with the Trust, Danziger allegedly used Adams's name, "Moonrise", and the AIPAD presentation to promote a commercial AI colorization project extended to other artistic legacies. This aspect exacerbates the tone of the statement, which mentions a "serious lack of ethical and professional judgment."
The central point, reiterated explicitly by the Trust, is that the dispute does not involve artificial intelligence as such. Adams "was extraordinarily forward-thinking and fascinated by the potential of computers to transform photography," the statement recalls. The issue is moral rights: no one should exploit the name, reputation, and work of another artist for private commercial purposes without explicit consent.
A Different Legal Case from the Training Set
It is worth noting that this case does not fall within the usual dispute over the use of protected works for model training, as it does not belong to those "gray area" cases where there are datasets of millions of images collected indiscriminately from the web. Instead, this situation involves a single artist explicitly named in a prompt, a single identifiable photograph transformed into output, and a $10,000 sale at an institutional fair. What has happened mirrors a pattern already observed in music, where major labels have requested the removal of tracks that imitate specific artists by exploiting their identity and fame.
However, the legal difficulty remains open: in the United States, the criterion is the doctrine of fair use, and particularly the “transformative” nature of the derived work. Some observers argue that the Danziger image, digitally overlaid on the original, shows different vegetation and architectural details: it would therefore be a new AI construction inspired by Adams's work rather than a literal colorization of it. This is a possible line of defense, weakened by the fact that the prompt explicitly names the artist and the work, and that the marketing has explicitly relied on the fame of both.
As of now, Danziger Gallery has not publicly responded to the statement. The piece remains for sale on the gallery’s website, while the Trust has not announced legal actions and has limited itself to a public appeal for the moral rights of the artist: "No one should exploit the name, reputation, and work of another person for private commercial purposes without consent and transparency."