Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (11)

Collector Rick Norsigian. Image courtesy of Rick Norsigian.

Amping up the bogosity and racing headlong toward a “goes to 11” mindset, Team Norsigian has apparently decided to sidetrack itself by investing some of its seemingly boundless energies in discrediting the “Uncle” Earl Brooks Theory of provenance for the Norsigian negatives. (Bogosity: “the state or condition of being bogus.”) Toward that end, they’ve dug up an online source for a small trove of Brooks’s commercial work, 81 images in all, presently housed in the Hagley Digital Archives in Wilmington, Delaware. Team Norsigian has actually issued a breathless, self-congratulatory September 16 press release to celebrate this presumably momentous “discovery.”

“In its continuing investigative efforts into the ‘Uncle Earl’ Theory,” the release states, “Team Norsigian also announced that it will be publishing an upcoming research report on Earl Brooks.” If it’s as richly comical an effort as their earlier classic, “The Lost Negatives of Ansel Adams,” I can hardly wait. I have high hopes, based on this teaser in the press release:

“One of Brooks’ grandchildren, who asked to remain anonymous, . . . informed Team Norsigian that she has discovered a camera that Earl Brooks used — a Kodak box camera (Model # Junior Six-16), which captures images on film, not glass. All of the images in the Norsigian Collection were captured on large glass negatives.”

Kodak Six-16 Brownie Junior

I’d guess that this camera was something like the Kodak Six-16 Brownie Junior, pictured here — introduced February 1934, discontinued October 1942. I hate to throw cold water on Team Norsigian’s excitement over the fact that such a camera could not possibly have produced the Norsigian negatives, but this constitutes yet another of those moments where they reveal their profound dumbness. Some hard facts:

• Professional photographers commonly own more than one camera.

• The Kodak Six-16 Brownie Junior is not a camera that any professional of that era would have used in a portrait studio such as the one Brooks ran for decades in Delaware. These box cameras represent the origin of the concept of the idiot-proof “point and shoot” consumer-end camera.

• The Kodak Six-16 Brownie Junior is certainly not a camera that any professional of that era would have used in an effort to make landscapes he hoped to license to National Geographic for publication — the reported motive for Brooks’s photographic car trips to Yosemite and other parts of California.

Earl Brooks. Detail of photo by Graham Hughes.

• The Kodak Six-16 Brownie Junior is the kind of camera that, as a professional photographer accustomed to working with large-format cameras and glass-plate negatives, one might bring along to make casual vacation snapshots for the family album, souvenirs of the adventure, in addition to one’s serious, considered exposures using professional-level equipment.

• The Kodak Six-16 Brownie Junior is also the kind of camera you’d readily put in the hands of an amateur, or a child, who accompanied you on a long road trip during which you’d stop periodically as a professional photographer to make your own exposures — and Brooks’s wife and children/stepchildren reportedly traveled with him on those expeditions to the west.

• In short, even if the grandchild’s attribution to Brooks himself of ownership of this camera is correct, it proves nothing whatsoever that supports any claim made by Team Norsigian. Specifically, it in no way undercuts the possibility that Brooks generated the negatives Team Norsigian claims as Ansel Adams’s, despite this press release’s suggestion to the contrary.

• All of which suggests that attorney Arnold Peter has, at best, a shaky grasp of the concept of evidence, and a limited ability to construct a coherent line of reasoning.

Arnold Peter, Esq.

By the way, the Brooks images in the Hadley archive constitute a mix of studio portraits, theater stills, and factory interiors: competently made and utterly conventional, typical — like his landscapes — of an unexceptional journeyman photographer of the period.

Instead of expending time trying to disprove the “Uncle” Earl Theory, Team Norsigian should devote itself to proving its own claims about Adams’s authorship. Eliminating Brooks from the field does not constitute anything remotely resembling authentication of these negatives as missing works by Adams. Yet another red herring waved around by Arnold Peter, Norsigian’s attorney, whose mismanagement of this entire project becomes more evident every day. Instead of distracting themselves with disproving the “Uncle” Earl Theory, Team Norsigian needs to hire a recognized photo researcher whose verdict the field will respect, and get itself to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, where the Adams archive resides. Anything else is smoke-blowing.

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It’s been a slow week on this story. Minor events:

Still from "The Lost Negatives."

• Team Norsigian has released the trailer for its self-touted “documentary,” titled “The Lost Negatives” and indicated as forthcoming in January 2011. Not to be missed, if only for the opening shot of Rick Norsigian, followed by attorney Arnold Peter, both protected by a security guard, sternly carrying the precious glass plates somewhere for white-glove handling and scrutiny. Production of the film presumably gets credited to PRS Media Partners, an offshoot of Peter, Rubin & Simon, LLP, the law firm representing Norsigian.

The trailer does have one moment of real interest: a fleeting glimpse of a photograph of Yosemite, its negative much damaged along its top edge, depicting a view across a lake towards what I think may be Half Dome in the distance. Notably, the negative includes a dozen people standing and sitting along a road on the shore at the lower left side of the image. In order to emphasize what he saw as the eternal aspects of this park, Adams almost invariably avoided all signs of human presence in his Yosemite photographs. I’ve never seen an Adams image of Yosemite that included tourists; if authenticated, this would be a first (for me, at least).

Still from "The Lost Negatives."

(P.S. Several regular readers have chastised me for failing to mention the trailer’s dramatic soundtrack; so, belatedly, I commend that also to your attention. — A. D. C., 9/27/10)

• A three-day show of what’s now referred to by Team Norsigian as “The Norsigian Collection” of photographic images took place at the David W. Streets Gallery in Beverly Hills this past weekend, September 23-25. Streets’s website now carefully avoids any reference to Ansel Adams — no doubt weighing its liability should the San Francisco Federal District Court rule in favor of the Ansel Adams Trust. Yet Streets continues to take orders for prints from these negatives, promoted still at the Norsigian website, in its announcement of the Streets showing, as an exhibition and sale of “images authenticated as the work of Ansel Adams.”

• A week earlier, the Duncan Miller Gallery on Venice Boulevard in Hollywood mounted an exhibition including some 20 authenticated Ansel Adams prints developed and signed by Adams himself, on loan from an unspecified source; three prints from the Norsigian negatives, lent by former Adams assistant Alan Ross, to whom Norsigian had sent them; and three “digital enlargements” of images by “Uncle” Earl Brooks that match or correspond closely to the Norsigian images, made from scans of the prints presumably by Brooks in the possession of his niece, Miriam Walton, and lent to this show by San Francisco gallerist Scott Nichols. This showing ran September 11-19, culminating with a September 19 program including an afternoon lecture on Adams and his work by Carol McCusker, former curator at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts, followed by a panel discussion including McCusker, Nichols and photographer and author John Upton. (Click here for Mike Boehm’s report in the September 10 Los Angeles Times.)

Meanwhile, the world awaits with less than bated breath the ruling of the San Francisco Federal District Court on the trademark-infringement suit filed on August 23 by the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. I have to ask why the Adams Trust didn’t file this suit immediately upon Team Norsigian’s announcement of print and poster sales at the July 27 press conference, and the simultaneous opening of two websites (Norsigian’s and Streets’s) devoted in part to that marketing enterprise.

The public debut of this marketing project constituted de facto trademark infringement; why not shut it down instantly? The Adams Trust had grounds for its suit the moment Team Norsigian issued its “Final Report” and started advertising prints and posters for sale under the name Ansel Adams, on July 27. Impossible to believe they got blindsided by this. Presumably they saw it coming; according to William “Wild Bill” Turnage, Michael Adams, and Norsigian himself, Norsigian’s been in touch with them persistently for close to a decade. He and his representatives have kept asking the Adams Herd to join them in this venture. They had ample advance notice, and plenty of time to nip this in the bud.

Instead of the stream of injudicious invective, and misleading comments about the differences between a print made by Adams and one made by someone else, why not just file this trademark-infringement suit pronto and put the whole thing to rest? I don’t see the logic in that strategy — unless, of course, you’re actually after the massive free publicity generated by this situation, which at no significant cost has brought considerable international attention to the authenticated Ansel Adams product line marketed by the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite in conjunction with the Ansel Adams Trust. Hmmmm . . . . .

Probably worth keeping in mind that Peter, Rubin & Simon, LLP — the legal partnership of Arnold Peter, Barbara M. Rubin and Jody Simon, which represents Rick Norsigian, backs the production of the documentary film about his purported Ansel Adams “find,” and is otherwise up to its neck in this whole enterprise — emphasizes its credentials in the “entertainment industry.” The same crew have formed PRS Media Partners, as noted above, to facilitate production of the in-progress documentary film. Perhaps we should look at this as an entertainment-industry project incorporating a massive publicity stunt, and a collaboration thereon among all the players on both sides . . .

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A footnote to all this: Photographer Jesse Kalisher has ended his relationship with the Team Norsigian project. Kalisher, a bit player in this melodrama, produced the initial round of exhibition-quality 16″ x 20″ prints from Norsigian’s purported Ansel Adams negatives, the same prints that went on display this past week at the David W. Streets Gallery in Beverly Hills.

According to Kalisher (and I see no reason to doubt him), the decision has a purely logistical basis. He’s based in Carrboro, North Carolina, which means the fragile glass-plate negatives have to get shipped to him, putting them at risk. He expressed those concerns, and Norsigian has therefore decided to work with someone closer to home — assuming, of course, that the current trademark-infringement lawsuit resolves in his favor, allowing him to continue production and marketing of works whose provenance he and his cohorts continue to attribute to Adams.

Kalisher himself has never proposed that Adams made these negatives; his role here is simply that of a custom printer. So he’s not implicated in any of Team Norsigian’s shenanigans. To his credit, he makes a point of putting in a good word on behalf of Streets, his former gallerist. For Kalisher’s blog post about this, click here.
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