Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (15)

On Team Norsigian’s “Report on Earl Brooks” (1)

Returning to the main thread of the “Lost Negatives of Ansel Adams” story so far, I move now to the Norsigian camp’s recent “investigative” report on photographer Earl Brooks, presently the favored alternative candidate for authorship of the 65 glass-plate negatives found in 2000 in Fresno by school-district painter Rick Norsigian and claimed by him and his cohorts as lost works by Ansel Adams.

Robert C. Moeller III's website.

Team Norsigian’s “Report on Earl Brooks,” released on October 8, 2010, was at least in part necessitated as damage control relating to “art expert” Robert C. Moeller’s defection. In a nutshell, Moeller, who lacks any professional-level expertise in the history of photography and photo research, first endorsed the attribution of these negatives to Adams and then recanted, ascribing at least some of them instead to Brooks — without, I should add, returning the money he took from Team Norsigian for his initial public support of their theory.

With the woebegone “art expert” David W. Streets, another original member of the team, now thoroughly discredited, and with the team’s “photography expert” Patrick Alt having recently started to change his mind about Adams’s authorship of the negatives (after earlier concluding his active involvement with Team Norsigian’s campaign), said cohort presently includes no one with any knowledge of photography or art. Not surprisingly, that ignorance is all over this report, whose announced purpose is the debunking of any attribution of these negatives to Brooks.

Let me remind you, yet again, that I have no investment in the Earl Brooks theory — nor any in Team Norsigian’s Ansel Adams Theory, nor again any in any other theory. My editorial commentary in this string of posts on the “lost Ansel Adams negatives” story addresses itself to the public statements made by the players on all sides of this drama, at their own websites (occasionally, as with Alt, at this one as well) and as reported in the press; to the documents and other testimony and evidence they present publicly in support of their positions; to their various actions and inactions, as manifested in those statements, documents, and reports; and to their professional credentials (or lack of same) for the tasks at hand, as indicated in those utterances or gleaned from other published sources — mostly their own websites.

This Team Norsigian report on Brooks takes 7 pages to assert what was, at the time of the report’s issuance several weeks ago, a simple fact: There are indeed resemblances, including several striking ones, between the four prints produced by Brooks’s niece Marian Walton and an equal number of the Norsigian negatives ― but, while it seems possible that the prints Walton owns came from negatives made by the same photographer who produced the Norsigian negatives, no evidence has yet emerged to substantiate a claim that Brooks made those prints.

Arnold Peter, Esq.

Unless and until such evidence gets produced, the Walton prints remain irrelevant (though intriguing), and distracting. Why, then, should Team Norsigian devote weeks to undermining the Brooks option, instead of putting its collective effort into bolstering its own case? Only Arnold Peter, madcap quarterback of Team Norsigian, can answer that one.

(Note: I see no reason not to assume that Peter pursues this matter in tandem with his partners in the “entertainment industry” law firm Peter, Rubin, & Simon LLP, Barbara M. Rubin and Jody Simon, who are also his cohorts in PRS Media Partners, LLC, the outfit producing the announced “documentary” film about the Norsigian find. When I refer henceforth to Peter, therefore, I’m using that as shorthand for the actions and statements of all three, for whom he’s the mouthpiece. Surely the credit for what they’re achieving should get shared; isn’t that what partnership is all about? For the marvelously melodramatic trailer for that forthcoming epic, announced for debut in January 2011, click here.) (Correction: On Nov. 1, 2010, Mr. Peter emailed me an “important clarification” asserting that, despite the fact that Ms. Rubin and Mr. Simon are partners in Peter, Rubin, & Simon LLP, they have as such no involvement “in the Norsigian matter.” In the same email, he informed me that, although the website of PRS Media Partners, LLC boasted that Rubin and Simon helped “launch” that separate entity, they “have no ownership or involvement” in it. Taking him at his word, I therefore retract the above statement in which I assumed their involvement in all matters relating to the firm in which they’re partners, as well as their involvement in the separate and autonomous firm they helped to “launch,” PRS Media Partners LLC. I apologize to Ms. Rubin and Mr. Simon for this error. Clearly the stilted language, flawed reasoning, and other deficiencies of Norsigian-related material prepared under the auspices of either entity are attributable exclusively to Mr. Peter.)

I base my assumption that Peter et al authored the “Report on Earl Brooks,” or at least supervised its production, on the following clues:

• it’s written in the tortured English that characterizes all of Team Norsigian’s published commentary (e.g., “‘Uncle’ Earl proponents must stop underestimating the public with implausible fairy tales,” and “this red herring has not strayed Team Norsigian from building upon the heretofore-conducted authentication efforts”); and

• it manifests a benchmark pattern of factual errors, evasions, half-truths, and outright deceptions — not to mention the inability to make logical arguments. Some samples:

• “Marian Walton, Earl Brooks’ niece, is in possession of three unsigned prints (not negatives), which were allegedly given to her late father by Earl Brooks (an event she never claims to have witnessed). Second, that the three unsigned prints in Walton’s possession are strikingly similar to three negatives in the Norsigian collection (out of a total of 65).” Actually, Walton has four prints, not three, as indicated in every news story about this intervention by Walton.

Walton print, left; Norsigian negative, right.

“At its core, ‘Uncle’ Earl [the Earl Brooks theory] is a red herring, and does nothing but divert attention away from the critical question—who created the Norsigian negatives?” A red herring is “a deliberate attempt to divert attention.” The possibility that Earl Brooks made these negatives was, according to all reports, introduced into the debate by the aging Walton, who simply professed to see similarities between prints she owned and images presented by Team Norsigian — similarities that others have acknowledged as well. Peter, therefore, is either accusing Walton of deliberately confusing the issue for unspecified motives of her own or else of being a willing tool of the Ansel Adams Trust and doing so at their bidding. Peter has presented no evidence to support such harsh and groundless accusations against Walton.

• “‘Uncle’ Earl was a tool designed to muddy the waters and to resist further authentication efforts.” This comes from the October 8 Team Norsigian press release accompanying and announcing their Earl Brooks report. It asserts even more clearly Team Norsigian’s accusation that Walton had ulterior motives for her claim re Brooks, and perhaps colluded with the Adams Trust and/or Gallery in an effort “designed to muddy the waters.” Such charges. which border on libel, require immediate proof or immediate retraction. That’s especially heinous — not to mention repellently hypocritical — since the only ones “resist[ing] further authentication efforts” are the players on Team Norsigian, who steadfastly refuse not only to hire any consultant with recognized credentials in photography but also to commission any recognized experts to perform forensic tests on the negatives and related materials, or to have any experts take those negatives to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson to perform comparative analyses with coterminous materials in the Adams archive there.

"Three Brothers with Morning Clouds." Image courtesy of Rick Norsigian.

• “The images in the Norsigian Collection have a decidedly ‘pictorial’ aesthetic. . . . Pictorialism is defined as ‘a soft-focus technique that provides a hazy, shimmering quality; hand-manipulated images that achieve a photographic print approximating a drawing or etching; photographs printed on toned and textured paper that recall pastel or lithographic techniques; and images that rely on subjects and compositions that closely reflect nineteenth-century romantic traditions.’” Absolute nonsense. The Norsigian negatives reflect no pictorialist premises whatsoever; no soft focus, no handwork. This is obvious to the naked eye even from the low-res scans posted online. Stylistically, they’re more closely akin to the sharp-focus 19th-century landscapes of Carleton E. Watkins and William Henry Jackson, which may have embodied the then-conventional romantic attitudes toward nature but otherwise have no relationship to pictorialism. By brazenly floating such crapola in the hopes that no one will call their bluff, Arnold Peter, Barbara M. Rubin, and Jody Simon make themselves into laughingstocks, and energetically work at eroding their own credibility. makes himself into a laughingstock, and energetically works at eroding his own credibility.

(To be continued.)

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For an index of links to all previous posts related to this story, click here.