Norsigian/Adams: Halftime Show (1)

Collector Rick Norsigian. Image courtesy of Rick Norsigian.

It appears as if the epic tale of Rick Norsigian’s struggle to authenticate his garage-sale glass-plate negatives as the work of Ansel Adams has gone into slow-mo, if not suspended animation.

The lawsuit filed against Norsigian and his posse by William Turnage and the Ansel Adams Trust, and the countersuit filed by Norsigian and his attorney Arnold Peter, aren’t scheduled to go to a trial by jury until May 2012. So that breaks the momentum.

Team Norsigian subsequently added the University of Arizona to its original suit, based on documented collusion between the university, the Center for Creative Photography (housed at the UofA), and the Adams Trust. Whether the law will allow the UofA to fall within the scope of that suit remains to be seen. The Adams Trust has moved to dismiss the Norsigian countersuit; presumably the court will rule on that in the next few months. Safe to assume the UofA will also move to dismiss.

A. C. Pillsbury, n.d.

Doutbless we’ll see motions related to both suits in the meantime, more disclosures of evidence, related decisions by the court, and such. Not to mention revelations by researchers seeking to tie these negatives to other makers, primarily Arthur C. Pillsbury and Earl Brooks. But, with the wheels of justice entering slow-grind mode, I’ll opt to keep my ears peeled for substantial developments, collecting pertinent bits and pieces for the purpose of issuing periodic updates — while turning my attention elsewhere.

Of course, if anything major appears I’ll get on the case instanter, but otherwise I plan to vary the menu. So, barring exciting news, this will serve as my last post on this story for some weeks. Consider this the halftime show. Stretch, take a bathroom break, make some popcorn, empty the dog.

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Which is not to say that the drama’s gone stale, or run out of surprises. This next item was relayed to me by reader Richard Kuzniak (a tip of the Coleman hat to him), and I reprint it belatedly in its brief entirety:

“60-Year-Old Caught with Pot on Turnpike,” by Patrick Schurr, datelined December 2, 2010 at a site named WeAreCentralPA.com:

Earl Brooks, "Self-Portrait," n.d.

“JUNIATA TOWNSHIP, BEDFORD COUNTY PA – A 60-year-old woman faces drug charges for driving through Bedford County with marijuana. State Police stopped Brooke Delarco of Wilmington, Del. along the [Pennsylvania] turnpike Wednesday [December 1] around 3:30 p.m. for traffic violations. They said they found about 10 lb. of pot while searching her car.

“Delarco’s being charged with possession with intent to deliver drugs.  She’s in the Bedford County Jail in lieu of $200,000 bail.” (Juniata, PA, pop. 1016 in the Y2K census, lies roughly 200 miles west and slightly north of Wilmington, DE. For the arresting officer’s terse report, click here.)

I’ve confirmed that this is the very same Brooke Delarco who features in our ever-expanding cast of characters as the step-granddaughter of photographer Earl Brooks — one of the two top alternate contenders for production of the Norsigian negatives — and an advocate of his claim to authorship thereof. Now they’ve nabbed her allegedly laying in a substantial stash of loco weed in anticipation of the holiday rush. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I’m for decriminalization, and I speak as one who did inhale, more than once, and even held it in, back in the day.)

Earl Brooks in Yosemite Park, 1914. From his journal. Courtesy Brooke Delarco.

This explains why we haven’t heard lately from Ms. Delarco, who last fall promised — in comments posted at this blog — a steady stream of evidence supporting the “Uncle Earl” Theory of Brooks’s creation of the Norsigian negatives. His great-grandson Cameron Horne of Atlanta, GA, provided some of that material to the press last November, but neither he nor Ms. Delarco has added to it since.

While this bust will loom large in Ms. Delarco’s legend, no doubt, I hope the charge gets tossed on a technicality. If not, experience tells us that incarcerating her with hardened criminals will only lead to worse things, like getting some really ugly tattoos and wearing her pants on the ground. As unofficial amicus curiae in this case, I recommend a sentence involving hundreds of hours of community service, to be defined as pursuing and publishing her research on Earl Brooks.

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Ansel Adams’s most-favored-photographer status at Yosemite National Park, about which I’ve commented previously, apparently goes back at least as far as 1941, and includes documented special treatment by the Department of the Interior. To wit:

In 1941, Adams and his wife Virginia (née Best) ran Best’s Studio in Yosemite, which they’d inherited from Virginia’s parents. Best’s Studio, formerly a small operation alongside the much grander and more profitable Arthur C. Pillsbury studio, Three Arrows, expanded dramatically in size and income after the Pillsbury studio burned down mysteriously in 1927. Best’s Studio’s permit to operate, granted by the U.S. Department of the Interior, “contain[ed] a prohibition against government employees sharing in either the permit or its benefits.”

Harold Ickes, Ansel Adams letter of introduction, 1941

This posed no problem until AA accepted a commission from the Department of the Interior to produce a set of murals for installation in the Department’s Washington, DC headquarters at 1849 C Street. That made him, de facto, a “government employee,” ineligible to receive benefits from his own studio. He obtained his appointment from Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, via a letter that gave him virtually carte blanche throughout the U.S. territories under the supervision of Department of the Interior.

Associate Director Arthur E. Demaray of the National Park Service had agreed to pay the salary of Ansel Adams, as an employee of the NPS Bureau of Interpretation, for both preparing his Mural Project images and installing them in the DC building. Since this commission, in combination with Adams’s permit for the Yosemite studio, created a legal conflict, Demaray proposed to his boss (and Adams’s), First Assistant Secretary of the Interior Ebert K. Burlew ― an FDR appointee ― that “this part of the provision is a matter of policy and probably could be waived by the Secretary in Mr. Adams’ case.” As indeed it was.

All this is thoroughly documented at The Mural Project Movie, the blog published by Lawrence Gillick about his film-in-progress about the Adams murals. Gillick obtained the relevant documents in the course of his research on the story behind those murals and their making. From these files one can see that many rules and regulations got bent or sidestepped — this in the middle of World War II ― to ensure that Adams pulled down a daily salary plus a per diem and travel expenses from the government (up to a maximum of “180 actual working days per annum”), for an unspecified amount of work and an unspecified number of images for murals.

Demaray letter to Burlew re Ansel Adams, 1941

Though obligated to fulfill a requirement to submit periodic reports and invoices, Adams did his work unsupervised, earning this income on top of what the Adams family raked in from its Yosemite concession. In 1940 the average income per year was $1,725.00; for the period of his mural project Adams received well over twice that amount, paid by his fellow citizens in the form of federal tax revenues. (As Bob Dylan sings in “Idiot Wind,” “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”)

It didn’t last long. The project ground to a halt shortly after the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II, never to resume. But the photographer eventually submitted “226 photographs taken for this project, most of them signed and captioned by Adams,” that ended up in the National Archives Still Picture Branch. (From the description thereof at the National Archives website, it’s clear that these are prints, not negatives.) Some of these were prints of images he’d made before this commission began, as far back as 1933.

Presumably Adams got paid for those prints, though I’ve yet to see the records on that. This group of works is officially identified by the National Archives as Ansel Adams Photographs of National Parks and Monuments, compiled 1941 – 1942, documenting the period ca. 1933 – 1942; ARC Identifier 519830 / Local Identifier 79-AA. According to the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) of the National Archives in re this group, “The original negatives were retained by Ansel Adams. Reproductions of items in this series are made from copy negatives produced by the National Archives. The photographic prints in this series are in the public domain. In correspondence dated August 18, 1942, from Adams to E. K. Burlew, First Assistant Secretary, Department of the Interior, Adams states that the photographs are the property of the U.S. Government.”

Ansel Adams, "Tetons and Snake River," 1942

This is all a bit sly. Unlike the Farm Security Administration photographs, Adams’s original negatives did not become public property ― not even the ones he made while on the government payroll. Adams retained them all, merely giving the Department of the Interior exhibition-quality contact prints thereof to use in deciding on the ones to produce as murals. From those Adams prints, the National Archives eventually made the copy negatives referred to above. Thus, again unlike the FSA images now at the Library of Congress, any print made from those copy negatives can’t qualify as an original print; it’s a third-generation derivation.

So, while the images are in the public domain (which enables their free reproduction in publications), Adams ensured that only he could make original prints therefrom. Which he did, profiting on them handsomely during his lifetime. His trust continues to profit on them to this day.

"Ansel Adams: The Mural Project," Peter Wright and John Armor, 1989

In 1989, several years after Adams died, Peter Wright and John Armor produced a book on that subject. In early 2010, the DOI finally fulfilled the plan. “Ansel Adams: The Mural Project 1941–1942,” on view by appointment only at DOI headquarters in the capitol, “features 26 giclee canvas murals of some of the most iconic sites of the American West including Grand Teton, Grand Canyon and Glacier National Parks.” The DOI had these oversize inkjet prints made from digital scans of the selected 26 Adams prints. Here’s a link to the DOI’s page about this venture; it includes viewing versions of all the images, plus a short video on the mural project and its long-delayed completion.

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