The saga of Rick Norsigian and his yard-sale negatives took some intriguing turns during my 2½-week hiatus October 31-November 18. Let me summarize the highlights:
A. C. Pillsbury, n.d.
1. Most notable, surely, was the initiation of Melinda Pillsbury-Foster’s extensive documentation supporting claims on behalf of her grandfather, the photographer, filmmaker, inventor, lecturer, and author Arthur C. Pillsbury as the maker of the negatives in the Norsigian Collection. Pillsbury bought his first Yosemite studio in 1897, and, as a photographer, had an ongoing relationship to the park thereafter. Eventually he ran a large Yosemite photo studio from 1924-27.
According to the timeline published at the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation’s website, in 1924 Pillsbury received a 20-year concession for his Studio of the Three Arrows in Yosemite’s New Village. “New Studio is large, including a theater which holds 250 people for nature movies.” That studio burned down under mysterious circumstances just a few years later, on November 4, 1927. Pillsbury lost all his negatives in that fire, never returned to the site to salvage anything therefrom, and abandoned his Yosemite enterprise.
A. C. Pillsbury, "Leaning Pine on Sentinel Dome," photo postcard, n.d. Courtesy of Marillynne Guske
At the time, a much smaller photography/art studio next door to Pillsbury’s, founded in 1902, was run by the photographer/painter Harry Best and his wife Anne, parents of Virginia Best, whom Ansel Adams married on January 2, 1928 — two months after the Pillsbury fire. The wedding took place “in the newly constructed Best’s Studio in the ‘new village’ in Yosemite Valley,” according to the official history of the gallery as posted at the website of the Ansel Adams Gallery. “Harry Best passed away in 1936, and Virginia inherited the business that she had been running for some years,” the same source indicates. Best’s Studio eventually became the Ansel Adams Gallery, turning Yosemite National Park into Adams’s private fiefdom and cash cow — one that, apparently, he somehow became entitled to pass along to his heirs and assigns to enjoy in perpetuity.
Melinda Pillsbury-Foster portrait
Pillsbury’s the alternative candidate for production of the Norsigian negatives at whose existence I hinted back in October. While Reyhan Harmanci’s November 9 story for the NY Times, “Ansel Adams or Not? More Twists,” introduced Pillsbury to the broader journalistic coverage of this story, the journalist Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, working in tandem with the Chicago-based photographer and collector Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka, has produced and begun to post at the Pillsbury Foundation’s website an already substantial and rapidly growing documentation of Pillsbury’s life as a photographer and inventor, including numerous close comparisons between Norsigian negatives and known Pillsbury images. For those willing to pore over detailed research, I highly recommend Pillsbury-Foster’s ongoing account. (The best place to start is here.)
I’ll have more to say about Pillsbury once I have a chance to absorb this material. I’ll refer to the Pillsbury-Foster/Kieltyka partnership henceforth as the Pillsbury Doughgirls. From my preliminary perusal of the documentation they’ve assembled, Pillsbury qualifies at least for serious consideration for potential authorship of the Norsigian Collection negatives.
Earl Brooks, "Self-Portrait," n.d.
2. Then there’s Brooke Delarco’s evidence that her grandfather, Earl Brooks, another leading candidate for the production of the Norsigian Collection negatives, wasn’t just a studio photographer. Substantiation for this claim comes from Brooks’s great-grandson Cameron Horne, who inherited “the photographer’s 673-page unpublished memoir, as well as diaries and photo albums,” according to Reyhan Harmanci’s “Ansel Adams or Not? More Twists” in the New York Times, November 9, 2010. (In his coverage of this development, a November 2 piece titled “Ansel Adams, Earl Brooks share top billing in show on Yosemite photography since the 1860s,” Mike Boehm of the Los Angeles Times indicates that the memoir bears the title “The Story of Earl Brooks and His Time, or 73 Years into the 20th Century by Earl Brooks Himself.”)
Earl Brooks in Yosemite Park, 1914. From his journal. Courtesy Brooke Delarco.
“One of the albums,” Harmanci continues, “contains an image that matches one of Mr. Norsigian’s negatives. In his writing, Mr. Brooks also talks about his use of glass negatives, a skill the Norsigian team had said they doubted he possessed.” This means that Team Norsigian counsel Arnold Peter’s October 8, 2010 “Report on Earl Brooks,” which I’ve already deconstructed, has developed yet another hole.
I’m not alone in awaiting full disclosure — online, preferably, as is happening with the Pillsbury materials — by Delarco of the photos, letters, journals, and other memorabilia left by her grandfather. This has begun to trickle out, but isn’t yet widely enough available to enable more than a few select individuals to examine it. (Myself not among them. What am I, chopped liver?)
3. Last, but surely not least, we have the interim decision of the Federal District Court of Northern in the case of “The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust v. PRS Media Partners, LLC et al,” which seeks to enjoin Team Norsigian from continuing to sell prints from negatives they’ve claimed Ansel Adams made. (This is Case Number 3:2010cv03740, filed on August 23, 2010 in the California Northern District Court, San Francisco; the presiding judge now is Jeffrey White.) It’s an intellectual property/trademark-violation suit; Adams’s name is trademarked. I consider it a slam-dunk for the Adams Trust, on the merits, and would expect a judge to see it that way.
Nonetheless, for reasons I can’t fathom, the Adams Trust has demanded a jury trial. Truly is it said of hubristic types like managing trustee William “Wild Bill” Turnage, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” A jury trial will allow Team Norsigian to pull out all the stops, put Rick Norsigian on the stand as working-class David to the Adams Trust’s fat-cat Goliath, trot out its lineup of questionable experts, and parade around its assertions of censorship and the public right to know.
Arnold Peter, Esq.
The censorship ploy — a claim by Peter to first-amendment protection for selling prints made from those negatives — strikes me as a desperation move. Peter’s filing claims that this controversy is “a matter of great public concern” that deserves “a robust debate.” As if it isn’t provoking that debate now, and as if that would cease perforce if convicted felon and Beverly Hills gallerist David W. Streets had to desist from hawking those prints.
Stopping Team Norsigian from marketing its Adams-branded product line doesn’t in any way interfere with Team Norsigian identifying the maker of the negatives, or with the ongoing debate; witness my regular posts and the vigorous comments appended thereto at this very blog. A judge would see through this argument in a Bay Area minute, and put a stop to it; a jury just might buy it.
William Turnage, managing trustee, Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
According to Maria Dinzeo’s report, “Judge Vacates Hearing in Ansel Adams Case,” published by Courthouse News Service on November 15, 2010, “The trust had planned to call a handwriting expert, a San Francisco art gallery owner [doubtless Scott Nichols] and Adams’ former assistant and biographer [Mary Alinder] to testify against Norsigian at the hearing.” I can’t imagine what relevance the Adams Trust thinks any of those people would have had to a trademark-violation suit. Wisely avoiding the sending in of the clowns, at least at this early stage, Judge White “canceled [the scheduled Nov. 12] hearing, saying he can decide on the viability of the lawsuit without oral argument from attorneys. . . . Judge White did not indicate when he will issue a ruling.”
Note: This will be a ruling on Team Norsigian’s motion to dismiss the suit, not a final ruling in the case itself. That may take many more months, especially if it involves a jury trial. (For Dinzeo’s earlier report on the progress of this suit, “Ansel Adams Trust Argues Its Case,” Courthouse News Service, October 21, 2010, click this link. Backtracking even further, here’s Reyhan Harmanci’s August 23 story in the Bay Citizen, “Ansel Adams Trust Files Suit.”)
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Surely enough there to keep Team Norsigian attorney Arnold Peter busy, especially since he lacks photography expertise himself, has no one now in his posse with that knowledge base, and thus has no way to respond knowledgeably to the Brooks and Pillsbury materials. Moreover, we’ve yet to see anything resembling hard evidence from Team Norsigian to buttress its own assertions. No forensic test results on even a single glass-plate negative. No comparison by a skilled and recognized photo researcher of the Norsigian negatives to coterminous Adams negatives at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. No hard and convincing proof of their claims, not to put too fine a point on it. Peter won’t get further on that score until he brings on board someone with recognized credentials in photo research and photo history. His own commentaries on matters photographic are painful to read; be very afraid that he’s working on more of the same.
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Attorney Manny Medrano
On November 19 I sent the following email to Manny Medrano. On the same day, I left a voicemail message at Medrano’s office soliciting his response. These were follow-ups to a previous email I’d sent him (a slight variant of the one below) on October 11, 2010. Medrano, self-described at his own website as “Speaker – Journalist – Attorney,” signed on as Team Norsigian’s “evidence and burden-of-proof expert” for the authentication of the negatives in the Norsigian Collection as the output of Ansel Adams.
Dear Mr. Medrano:
I’m writing to you again in relation to your role as a member of “Team Norsigian,” the cohort that in late July 2010 authenticated 65 negatives found by Rick Norsigian at a yard sale as the work of the late master photographer Ansel Adams.
As you’re probably aware, I’ve tracked this story at my blog, Photocritic International, since late July. You’ll find links to all my posts on this subject here.
You’re quoted in Team Norsigian’s published report, “The Lost Negatives of Ansel Adams,” as follows:
“I have sent people to prison, for the rest of their lives, for far less evidence than I have seen in this case. In my view, those photographs were done by Ansel Adams.”
As you’ve probably learned, one of Team Norsigian’s “art experts,” the Beverly Hills dealer David W. Streets, has now been revealed as a convicted felon and known fraudster.
Team Norsigian’s second “art expert,” art dealer Robert C. Moeller III, has fully recanted his attribution of these negatives, switching instead to the so-called “Uncle” Earl Brooks Theory.
And Norsigian’s “photo expert,” photographer and antique-camera repairman Patrick Alt, delared as follows last month, in a post at my blog:
“As to the current status of my stance on the Norsigian plates, after hearing the opinion of my old friend John Sexton, who is convinced they are not by Ansel, I am now leaning toward that as well. I trust John’s integrity and his long history with Ansel and if it is good enough for John, I think I should follow his lead.”
Alt, as reported in a recent Los Angeles Times story, has since indicated that he’s now only “80% convinced” that the negatives were made by Adams.
I assume you’ll agree that, if this were a legal case, the side on which you’ve placed yourself would be in deep trouble, with its expert witnesses either discredited or recanting (or both). Certainly you’d have trouble sending someone to prison on this basis. So I’m wondering if you have any public comment to make about all this.
I’ll be glad to offer you space at my blog, in the form of a Guest Post, if you want to comment at length. I simply publish such posts as written by my guests; they become the main page of my blog for several days, then get archived and indexed so that they remain available indefinitely. You’ll find Alt’s here.
If you have a shorter comment, I can incorporate that into an upcoming post of my own. Or, if you would prefer to respond in a form such as an email q&a, we can set that in motion.
I look forward to hearing from you on this at your earliest convenience.
Best wishes,
A. D. Coleman
No response to date — or, in standard journalese, Mr. Medrano was not available for comment at press time, despite repeated attempts to contact him. Come out, come out, wherever you are, Manny Medrano.
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For an index of links to all previous posts related to this story, click here.
I’ve read the Pillsbury photographic analyses and all they prove to me is what we’ve known all along – MANY people photographed Yosemite during the early part of the previous century and there are many good forgotten photographers that deserve refamiliarization. Pointing out similar features in side by side photo comparisons only proves the above, not a Norsigian link to any specific photographer. The fact that shadows appear identical proves only that the photographs were taken during a similar time of day in a similar time of year – fixed features will produce the same shadows at a given time of day/year– they could be weeks apart! Although I find the work of Pillsbury intriguing, I see no reason at *this point to consider him the creator of the Norsigian negatives. It might be better to have the following specific questions answered first:
1.) What format and type of negatives are in the possession of the Pillsbury family/archive that are associated with held prints?
2.) Is there any evidence that Pillsbury used Whole-Plate (6.5″x8.5″) glass plates?
3.) Are there EXACT prints of any of the Norsigian negatives in Pillsbury possession?
With regard to Earl Brooks the answers to those questions are: 1.) none (other than in Norsigian’s possession) found yet, 2.) Brooks talks of using glass plates, 3.) yes, at least two EXACT
*there is some speculation that there may be exact prints of Norsigian negatives held by the Pillsbury archive. If so, then this is obviously a game changer. But it now raises the question: “How did Earl Brooks come into possession of at least two of Pillsbury’s exact prints of negatives currently held by Norsigian?” The exact same question was in force if Ansel provenance is assumed. Ah, this a great little mystery, is it not?!?
I hope it’s clear that I’ve made no commitment to the Pillsbury theory. I’ve yet to do more than skim the substantial material posted at the Pillsbury site by Melinda Foster-Pillsbury and Charlotte Anjelika Kieltyka. And I’ve seen only reports on the additional Brooks material, plus a few published snippets thereof.
To answer one of your questions, however: Pillsbury had shops/studios in both Yosemite and San Francisco. It would have been easy for Earl Brooks to purchase prints from Pillsbury ― or, as a fellow photographer, to swap prints with him, or receive prints as a gift. Photographers to this day commonly exchange prints with each other (much more frequently than painters swap canvases or sculptors trade bronzes).
Implicit in your comment is the understanding that, in scientific inquiry, competing theories get tested against the evidence. I’d say that, from a scientific/forensic standpoint, we’re still in the data-gathering phase of the process. Certainly that’s how I see it. I don’t intend to draw conclusions about the theories until (a) the data is all in, and (b) it’s been subjected to some consistent tests, and (c) the data and the test methods and the test results have been made public. Until then, it’s all speculation, in my opinion.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t discuss, comment on, and critique the actions, behaviors, and statements of the parties involved, of course. It simply means that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions yet, in regard to the theories themselves. As a responsible jury in the court of public opinion, we need to weigh all the evidence ― which we don’t yet have.
TOTALLY agree with you Mr. Coleman. But one intriguing thought occurs: how likely would it be for Brooks (or me , or you, or…) to illustrate a personal memoir/scrapbook with someone else’s photograph, especially without acknowledging its source or the circumstances of meeting the photographer?
Also, darn the luck! Why didn’t Brooks buy/have given prints from Ansel/Pillbury of negatives that were NOT subsequently lost and found again (i.e no longer in those photographers’ archives)? Seeing as the scarcity of his (Brooks’) negatives seems to be absolute compared to the very well archived collections of Adam and Pillsbury, one is tempted to invoke Sir William again…
Once photographic prints on paper became commonplace and inexpensive, in the last decades of the 19th century, and photographers’ studios began shopping views to the tourist trade in locales worldwide, it became commonplace also for buyers to paste them into their own albums as illustrations of their travels, annotate them (or not) as they chose ― while not necessarily indicating maker, provenance, etc. This was a time when the photographic image was considered a neutral transcription, the maker simply an operator of a mechanism.
So I wouldn’t find it surprising to discover a Pillsbury print, unidentified as such, in a Brooks album, or vice versa. It would of course surprise me if he claimed it as his own and it turned out to be someone else’s work, but that’s not the case. And, if it’s indeed a Brooks image/print in a Brooks album, I’d expect to see a note to the effect of “Made this one 6 a.m. on Sunday, June 12,” or some such. The absence of such a note doesn’t prove anything, but it’s curious.
There appear to be a number of holdings of Pillsbury negatives ― most extensively, in terms of current information, at Brigham Young University and in Melinda Pillsbury-Fosters private collection (or the collection of the Pillsbury Foundation). Pillsbury prints in various formats, lantern slides, and other works by him are also in a variety of collections. A colleague of mine in the Washington, DC area has volunteered to check at the Library for Congress; since Pillsbury gives a copyright notice on many of his works, seems possible he registered those works with the Copyright Office of the LOC.
No indication yet of whether any Brooks negatives survived and, if so, where they reside. But the game’s afoot, as Sherlock Holmes would say, and the current hue and cry may result in their discovery.
Read the above comments and agree. This is a process. You start with a theory, do research, and then go where the facts take you.
Charlotte and I had a working theory but that changed slightly due an unexpected development. More on that when the research is well enough advanced.
Here is my comment on No. 18 Happy Thanksgiving!
Melinda, your comment page (link above) is VERY intriguing! (is it possible to comment on the comments, BTW?) You have posed a very plausible explanation for the origin of the prints in Walton’s possession. BUT, could those prints not have been made on subsequent visits to Yosemite by a more mature Brooks with a few more hundred negatives under his belt? All of this underscores the need for real forensic testing of the Norsigian negatives which the dream team sems loath to do. Barring that, it would help (or confuse!) matters enormously if Whole-Plate glass negatives of your grandfather (or Brooks for that matter) were found in the family!
I am enjoying this altogether too much!! As I’ve said before, if nothing else (and there’s oodles of else!), this has given me the pleasure of introducing me to photographers that I was not previously overly familiar with. I may even bid on one of those Pillsbury post-earthquake panoramics currently on eBay!
Hi Richard!
It seems only fair to comment on comments. We would not want anyone to feel ignored, after all.
Actually, it would not have been possible. The road, as shown, dates from before there was auto traffic. The Pillsbury photo of the road, similar, was taken before 1906. No time travel machine. Sorry.
But, we just put up another very intriguing post on the Pillsbury site. Check it out, the title is Ansel Adams, newly discovered insights, a Photographic Tour, I’s sure you will enjoy this chapter of the ongoing detecting!
Best, Melinda and Charlotte aka, the Pillsbury DoughGirls.
The Pillsbury DoughGirls are doing truly spectacular work. To say that it is intriguing is surely an understatement. What is being uncovered is rich and wonderful and I can hardly wait for more. The interconnections among Pillsbury, Ansel, Brooks are being uncovered and what an amazing history is evolving. Thank you for your efforts!
Thank you Richard,
We will be putting out a news release on Monday which we hope will be illuminating and assist in moving the dialog forward to resolution.
Also, the films Pillsbury used in his lecture tours are now becoming a short video. We are adding some stills from these discovered films to the FILM page, where you can see the titles of some of the segments he used for his lectures and Charlotte and I have another short insight on the Norsigian Vernal Falls.
Two new reads for your pleasure.
Vernal VeritiesPillsbury in Films
All the Best, Melinda