Ansel Adams Trust Slams Gallery for AI-Generated Work at AIPAD Photography Show
The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust criticized New York’s Danziger Gallery for offering an AI-generated image referencing Ansel Adams at the 2026 AIPAD Photography Show, which ran April 22–26. The untitled work, labeled “A.I. GENERATED” and described as made from the prompt “Make a realistic color version of Ansel Adams’ iconic ‘Moonrise Over Hernandez’,” was listed as printed by master printer Esteban Mauchi and shown alongside artists including Seydou Keïta, Hoda Afshar, and Matthew Porter. In a statement released Saturday, the trust said it did not authorize or consent to the work, argued it exploited Adams’s name and failed to identify any human artist, and said it asked Danziger to remove it, which the gallery appeared not to have done; Danziger, founded in 1989, did not comment to ARTnews by press time. Photographers including Pete Souza and Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist David Hume Kennerly publicly condemned the decision, and the trust noted a similar 2024 dispute in which it denounced Adobe for hosting AI images tagged as “Ansel Adams-Style Photography,” after which Adobe removed the content.
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