Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (14)

"Photography Expert" Patrick Alt's website.

Before I move to other related matters in the saga of the “Lost Negatives of Ansel Adams,” let me say that I have no reason to doubt the assessment of Rick Norsigian offered recently in a Guest Post at this blog by Patrick Alt, Team Norsigian’s “photography expert.” Alt wrote, “a more honest and honorable guy [than Rick Norsigian] would be hard to find.” Unfortunately, agreement with those descriptors doesn’t prevent adding others, such as naïve, manipulable, and deluded. Nor does it require anyone to agree with Alt’s assertion that “This quest of his [Norsigian’s] has always centered on finding the truth.” That’s simply false, as all the evidence indicates — starting with Rick Norsigian’s own words.

As Norsigian himself put it in November 2009, “I want to prove once and for all that I knew what I was talking about. . . . I’m 100 percent — if not more than 100 percent — positive that these are the works of early Ansel Adams, because I tried to prove myself wrong,’ Norsigian said.  ‘I tried to find another photographer close to that kind of quality, and I couldn’t do it.'”

Collector Rick Norsigian. Image courtesy of Rick Norsigian.

He reiterated this attitude in his most recent statement to the press: “If they can prove I’m wrong, then it’s over . . . but if I’m right, which I know I’m right, that’s why I think they don’t want to sit down,” Norsigian said. “The public deserves to know the truth.” (”See “Rick Norsigian And The Lost Negatives” by Adam Popescu, Beverly Hills Courier (post date not clear, presumably the last week of September.) By definition, a person who’s “100 percent positive” of his belief, “knows he’s right,” and has convinced himself that he leads a crusade to bring that “truth” to “the public” is not on a search for truth. He’s persuaded himself that he’s already found it; he’s a true believer, looking for vindication of his conviction.

This brief statement by Norsigian contains, in condensed form, most of the delusions under which he operates, and with which he appears to have infected the other members of Team Norsigian in what I’m tempted to call a folie à dix (to include all members of Team Norsigian).

Team Norsigian’s internationally publicized claim that Ansel Adams made these negatives does not obligate anyone — the Adams Trust, the Adams Gallery, me, or any other party — to “prove them wrong.” To the contrary, it obligates Team Norsigian to prove themselves right, according to established standards of authentication in the field. This they have utterly failed to do.

Arnold Peter, Esq.

That failure has resulted, in considerable part, from Team Norsigian’s consistent policy of hiring people like Patrick Alt and Robert C. Moeller III, who have no credentials as photo appraisers, photo researchers, and/or photo scholars, none of the necessary skill sets for the process of authentication of photographic prints and negatives, no track records of relevant activity in the field, and thus no credibility for their purported expertise. This we can lay directly at the feet of attorney Arnold Peter and his legal colleagues. (By Alt’s own account, “I was of course curious as to how they found me and was told they did an extensive 3 day internet search and it was my name they kept coming up with.” In other words, Arnold Peter, head of Team Norsigian, who admittedly knows nothing about photography himself, assembled his players by doing Google searches using who knows what search terms. The mind boggles.)

Team Norsigian’s practice of engaging “experts” irrelevant to their case gets compounded by the adamant refusal of Norsigian et al to subject these negatives to any standard form of forensic analysis, amplified further by their concurrent refusal to take the negatives and related materials (annotated manila storage envelopes, newspaper wrappings) to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ, so that an expert photo researcher of their choosing with credentials widely recognized in the field, commissioned by them, can compare said negatives to negatives from the same period by Adams, and perform other related researches in the Adams archive at the CCP.

Robert C. Moeller III's website.

Instead of hiring someone grounded in photo history, with a knowledge base relevant to the authentication of photographic negatives, to go to Tucson, Team Norsigian chose Robert C. Moeller III, a know-nothing in relation to photography, for that task. They didn’t send any of the Norsigian negatives along with him, or even designate Patrick Alt, their “photography expert,” to accompany him. According to the New York Times, “Mr. Moeller said that, as part of Mr. Norsigian’s expert team, he had been paid $1,000 a month plus expenses for six months last year to pore over the 61 glass-plate negatives [actually, it’s 65] that Mr. Norsigian bought for $45 at a garage sale in Fresno, Calif., 10 years ago. . . . Mr. Moeller said that his work included traveling twice to the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson, Ariz., the site of Adams’s archives; doing fieldwork in Yosemite; and consulting photographers.” (See “A Turnaround in Ansel Adams Photo Dispute” by Reyhan Harmanci, August 30, 2010.)

For $6K plus expenses they could have bought some real expertise in photo historianship. Instead, they pissed it away on an incompetent “art expert” who has since recanted his position, switching allegiance to the Earl Brooks camp. (Question: Does Moeller have the integrity to return the money, now that he’s turned apostate?)

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There’s an activity in scientific inquiry known as “saving the appearances.” The idea derives from Simplicius’ sixth-century commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo. Simply put, “saving the appearances” originally meant that hypotheses which explain observable facts  — “appearances” — are not for that reason necessarily true, and don’t have to be. They merely had to rationalize the facts in question conveniently and easily. Under this conception, two contradictory hypotheses, neither of them correct, could both explain — i.e., “save” — the appearances, some given set of observable facts.

This activity thrived during a time when what we take for granted as the premise of science — proof, testing, independent verification of results — had not yet become a necessary component of scientific inquiry. Science then functioned as a branch of logic, and thus of rhetoric; it wasn’t necessary for a scientific hypothesis to be proven, if it was persuasively argued. Thus Aristotle felt free to opine that women had fewer teeth than men, without ever bothering to look into the mouth of his wife Pythias and counting.

Times have changed, and “saving the appearances” now has a different meaning. In his classic text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the historian and philosopher or science Thomas Kuhn elaborated on this. He proposed that, as evidence disproving any scientific theory accumulated sufficiently to threaten that theory’s plausibility, scientists adhering to it spent increasing amounts of time and energy generating elaborate explanations for that contrary evidence —”saving the appearances” — until, eventually, it became impossible to deny the undermining proof, and the theory got discarded, most reluctantly of course by its committed advocates and adherents.

This dovetails neatly with the Occam’s Razor principle, to which I’ve referred previously. This principle proposes that, all else being equal, the simplest answer to any question is most likely the right one. But the kicker is “all else being equal”; there you have the limit of Occam’s Razor. So long as an issue remains entirely in the realm of hypothesis, it works fine. Once actual evidence enters the discussion, the odds on the simplest answer proving right can change.

So far, Team Norsigian has relied entirely on hypothesis in making its case for Ansel Adams’s authorship of the disputed negatives. They’ve constructed that case like a house of cards, building it with inference and assumption, meaning that, in legal terms, it’s entirely circumstantial — the weakest form of case, as any lawyer knows, potentially contradicted by a single shred of hard evidence.

Occam’s Razor gives that argument a certain plausibility, but only up to the point that tangible evidence comes into the picture. And Team Norsigian has consistently misread physical evidence and/or refused to gather it through standard research/forensic methods. Instead, they’ve busied themselves “saving the appearances” — shoring up their crumbling theory, instead of proving it.

As Thomas Sowell writes in his book A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (1987), “To the extent that one has become emotionally committed to, or publicly identified with, a particular theory, its failure in the face of evidence imposes psychic costs that can be painful. In an attempt to reconcile the paradigm with the incoming discordant evidence, an initially simple principle may be modified until it resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption.”

Sowell prefaced that passage with another statement: “[P]erhaps the most striking demonstration of the power of a vision occurs when no evidence at all is either asked or offered for assertions which are consonant with a prevailing vision.” (Italics his.) The Occam’s Razor explanation for Team Norsigian’s lack of interest in generating hard evidence? Authorizing forensic testing and enabling direct comparison with Adams materials involves the risk of blunt and ineluctable fact disproving once and for all their imaginary scenario. And, on every level — psychological, professional, financial — they can’t afford to let that happen. They’re too deeply invested in their narrative to chance an alternative outcome.

But they’ve skated too long on the thin ice of circumstantial evidence, hypothesis, and inference. It’s cracking beneath them, and the icy waters of reality roil below.

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David Schonauer, former editor-in-chief of American Photo, delivered a thoughtful October 13 post on the story so far at his blog, I Like to Watch: “The Lost Ansel Adams Negatives: 10 Essential Plot Points.” Schonauer interviewed me at some length for this piece, so you’ll find comments of mine quoted and paraphrased extensively therein.

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