Adams Authentication and the CCP (3)

As noted in previous posts in this series, sometime circa November 15, 2010 the Center for Creative Photography apparently planted a story in the Arizona Daily Wildcat, the supposedly independent newspaper of the University of Arizona-Tucson. The story, “Ansel Adams authenticated: Center for Creative Photography verifies claims of original works,” appeared in the Wildcat issue datelined November 23, 2010, under the byline of cub reporter Rebecca Rillos.

Rebecca Senf

I say the CCP “apparently planted” this because the story, which spells out the protocols for what the CCP calls “authentication consults” provided to people who believe they have Ansel Adams material, has no news angle serving as the occasion for its publication. That is, it doesn’t announce a new service provided by the CCP; Rillos’s primary source for this report, Rebecca Senf, acting senior curator for the CCP, states that this process has gone on long enough to become a “normal activity” for the CCP. Nor does the story spring from some notable recent occurrence of this “authentication consult” procedure at work. Indeed, the absence from this account of any single identified instance of the initiation and outcome of such a “consult,” whether it resulted in authentication or invalidation of the material, is striking.

Rebecca Rillos

In my experience as a cultural journalist, such a story rarely gets instigated by the journalist who writes it, since there’s nothing immediate or visible to draw the journalist’s attention to the subject. (E.g., someone’s discovery of a stash of Ansel’s passionate, X-rated love letters to Nancy Newhall, newly validated as such by the CCP.) It reads like a story fed to the reporter by the source, who’s using the reporter as a mouthpiece and the periodical as a platform. Not uncommonly, such story ideas get presented to newbie journalists (Rillos is a UofA sophomore), who won’t know the difficult questions to ask. I’m prepared to stand corrected if Rillos claims she stumbled upon this free service offered at the Center and proposed it to her editor without prompting by the CCP, but until then I’ll assume the CCP decided, for its own reasons, to make this service public by setting up Rillos’s interview with Senf, on which the story is based.

Clearly Senf spoke to Rillos on the record and of her own volition, in her capacity as acting senior curator for the CCP. Since neither Senf nor the CCP have issued any corrections, demanded any retractions, or repudiated the Wildcat story more than a month after it first saw print, we can take it as an official public position statement by the CCP. As such, we can also assume the story had the approval of the CCP’s director, Katharine Martinez; the CCP’s Board of Fellows, which oversees the Center’s activities; Carla J. Stoffle, Dean of Libraries and the Center for Creative Photography at the the University of Arizona-Tucson (to whom Martinez reports); and William “Wild Bill” Turnage, managing trustee of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, who, as we now know, dictates CCP policy and procedures behind the scenes.

It’s highly unusual, indeed irregular, for any museum or archive to get involved in the activity of authenticating works of art or any other kind of material. Consider the following relevant policies from two other U.S. institutions from two different coasts, randomly chosen:

And here are the College Art Association’s detailed criteria for and warnings about the institutional concerns raised by authenticating artworks.

Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ

The CCP, by contrast, merely posts the following amidst its own FAQs at its website: Q: Can the Center advise me on the value of a photograph? A: The Center offers research assistance into the archives and collections but staff are not able to help appraise photographs. You might be able to find resources at www.photography-guide.com or the Association of International Photography Art Dealers at www.aipad.com.

So, for reasons both legal and ethical, most reputable museums and archives steer clear of engaging in anything that could be called “authentication” of artworks and related materials. This has always been my understanding. On that basis, as well as in light of personal experience with the Center for Creative Photography up through Y2K, I’d reiterated my overconfident assertion that the CCP did not provide authentication services in re the works of Ansel Adams or anyone else.

Dean Carla J. Stoffle

Turns out I was wrong, at least insofar as the last decade is concerned. According to the Rillos story, the CCP has offered “authentication consults” for some considerable period of time. The CCP’s provision of authentication services had to result from a dialogue between some CCP director, Carla Stoffle of the UofA library system, the CCP’s Board of Fellows, and the board of the Ansel Adams Trust. However, the “authentication consults” indicated as “normal activity” by Senf go unmentioned at the CCP’s site. Indeed, though prominent throughout Rillos’s report, the word “authentication” doesn’t appear anywhere at the CCP website. This immediately raises several obvious questions:

• If this “authentication consult” process, with an established set of protocols and procedures, is now “normal activity” for the CCP, and has been such for several years, why has the Center failed to indicate that at its website, instead merely stating that they won’t appraise works?
• Why would the Center, through its spokesperson Rebecca Senf, choose to announce and elaborate on this service via the vehicle of the Arizona Daily Wildcat, a small-circulation local/regional general-audience publication that doesn’t reach anyone in the art and photography worlds? I can’t think of a more obscure and unlikely outlet for this disclosure, if the goal was to inform the community that might actually make use of the CCP as a resource for this purpose. (If the goal was to make it possible to claim they’d “talked to the press” about this while keeping it as quiet as possible, however, then leaking the story exclusively to the Wildcat makes a great deal of sense.)
• Why would the CCP (by which I mean not only Senf and Martinez but also Dean Stoffle) elect to go on record about their offering of these “authentication consults” at this particular moment, in the midst of their dust-up with Team Norsigian, and after Martinez signed off on an August 27th statement titled “A Message From the Director” that read, in part, “We have no reason to believe that these negatives are, in fact, the work of Ansel Adams, and we support the efforts of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust to protect its rights in this matter” — this despite the fact that neither she nor any other CCP staffer had ever laid eyes on any of the original Norsigian materials, much less put them through the tests indicated as standard in their “consults”?
• Why did William “Wild Bill” Turnage of the Adams Trust approve the CCP’s provision of these “authentication consults” to the public, and then authorize the making public of them via the granting of Self’s Wildcat interview? This seems more than peculiar with a court decision pending on the Trust’s suit against Team Norsigian — especially since the court had, on December 8, denied defendants’ motion to dismiss and the Trust seemed likely to prevail in its trademark-violation action.
• Reader Martin Magid adds the following sensible queries: “Since apparently no one has come forward and claimed they had used the CCP authentication service, can CCP provide a list, or perhaps a description of the people or organizations who used the services, who is it at the CCP who worked on each authentication project, when did they occur, how many documents or photos were involved, what was the result for each? And can it supply copies of the authentication reports, perhaps with names redacted for privacy reasons?”
• Add to these the numerous questions I posed in my last post and you’ll have some idea of how I’d pursue this story, and what Rillos should ask Senf in a follow-up interview.

Collector Rick Norsigian. Image courtesy of Rick Norsigian.

You can see, I hope, how this matter begins to bear on Team Norsigian’s struggle to authenticate the negatives it claims were made by Adams. Norsigian and his representatives have made numerous efforts to involve the CCP in the authentication of those negatives. In light of the revelation that the CCP does in fact “routinely” authenticate Adams material via a set of established protocols, the CCP’s responses to Team Norsigian’s requests can only be termed suspicious — inappropriate and, in several cases, inconsistent with its own established policies and procedures. I’ll speak to that more specifically in an upcoming post.

(To be continued.)

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