Ansel Adams’s signature
In my last installment of this seemingly endless story, posted on March 15, I indicated that the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust and Team Norsigian had reached a confidential out-of-court settlement in which William “Wild Bill” Turnage of the Trust pledged to stop calling Team Norsigian names while Team Norsigian promised to stop using Ansel Adams’s name to validate the anonymous negatives Rick Norsigian bought at a yard sale.
It’s somewhat more complicated than that, of course, but that’s the gist of it. (Here’s Mike Boehm’s March 18 take on the settlement, from the Los Angeles Times: “Unable to use Ansel Adams’ name to sell Yosemite pictures, Rick Norsigian cuts prices.” And here’s Reyhan Harmanci’s report from the Bay Citizen, March 14, “Ansel Adams Photo Dispute Settled (Legally, at Least).”) If you want to read the joint press release the two parties issued on March 14, go to it here at Team Norsigian’s site.
Turnage has, at least publicly, kept his part of the bargain. Whether Team Norsigian has done the same I can’t say for sure. Consider this:
- The Norsigian website as of this date — more than a month after the announcement of the settlement — carries a report titled, in large type,THE LOST NEGATIVES: 65 glass negatives created by Ansel Adams. Subtitled “FINAL REPORT OF INVESTIGATIVE TEAM,” this document bears on its title page the following small-type disclaimer: “The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust does not in any way support the proposition that the glass negatives referenced in this report were created by Ansel Adams. Further, this report is not intended for marketing, promotional or other commercial purposes.”
Norsigian “Lost Negatives” report, revised, March 2011, cover
- This report differs in several ways from Team Norsigian’s original “Final Report,” which you’ll find by clicking the preceding link. As just indicated, it’s undergone a minor retitling. The name and address of David W. Streets, con man and convicted felon turned Beverly Hills gallerist, has vanished from the title page. The entire document now appears on a khaki rather than a white background, giving it a peculiarly military cast. And the CVs and bio sketches of Team Norsigian’s panel of “experts” — many of them, like Patrick Alt and Robert C. Moeller III, with questionable credentials for the job — have been entirely deleted. Nothing in the new edition of the report thus gives weight to their definitely arguable opinions.
- Other than that, this revision appears identical to the original report. (Note: I have not gone through it line by line to compare the two versions.) This means that it makes no reference to the subsequent recantation of their affirmations by Moeller and Alt, nor updates or corrects in any other way the proven fallacies, misstatements, and other errors in the original report, as assessed exhaustively in multiple posts at this blog. In short, though published on March 14, 2011, it contains exactly the same material as did the original report, issued July 26, 2010, minus one chunk.
- On March 19, 2011, five days after the issuance of the “Joint Statement Regarding Settlement,” Team Norsigian unilaterally issued a press release through PRWeb titled “Rick Norsigian Announces Significant Donation From The Lost Negatives Collection To Public Educational Organizations.” In it, Rick Norsigian offered to give a digital print made from one of these negatives to “any publicly funded educational organization,” defined as “schools, colleges, and other organizations with an educational mission.” Norsigian even “agreed to absorb all shipping, postage and handling costs.” (Alas, the donation program, which just came to my attention courtesy of a reader, extended only “through the end of March.”) So far, so good, and very generous, though that window of opportunity certainly closed quickly. But the release also contains the following quote from Norsigian: “I hope that every eligible organization will take advantage of this opportunity to display these stunning images and use the discovery and authentication process to teach a new generation about the beautiful art of photography and the magic of Ansel Adams.”
William Turnage, still from the Ric Burns film “Ansel Adams” (2002)
Say what? Reminding you, once again, that I’m certified by the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court as not a lawyer, I don’t see the above activity as ceasing and desisting in the use of Adams’s name in conjunction with these images. Possibly I’ve overlooked some technicality, according to which the public utterances that I’ve just listed don’t constitute using Adams’s trademarked name “in connection with the sales, promotion or advertisement of negatives, prints, posters, or other merchandise based on negatives.” I await elucidation of this nuance from Team Norsigian’s counsel, the redoubtable Arnold Peter. But it wouldn’t surprise me to find Wild Bill rampaging in the china shop again if this keeps up. Team Norsigian seems intent on goring that ox.
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A few days earlier, March 17, in another press release from PRWeb, Rick Norsigian had announced that “commemorative posters (originally sold for $45) will be given away free of charge,” subject to a postage and handling fee. This offer also expired at the end of March. Perhaps he’ll renew it, if supply and demand allow.
Meanwhile, they’ve lowered the prices drastically on the various formats of gelatin-silver and digital prints they offer at Norsigian’s website, made from the anonymous negatives. These reduced prices, however, still tower over the prices charged by the Ansel Adams Gallery for “Yosemite Special Edition Photographs” — printed from Adams’s original negatives on gelatin-silver fiber-based paper by Alan Ross (trained by Adams to print them), priced reasonably at $225. Aside from their status as historical curiosities, I don’t see why anyone would pay considerably more for a print by an unidentified photographer’s negative from the Norsigian Collection.
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Examples of “fire-damaged” negatives, from Team Norsigian’s “Final Report.”
Help wanted: Ansel Adams redacted his output with great care in order to define clearly his body of work — which, as with most photographers, is much smaller than his total production of negatives. All told, he printed, published, and exhibited some 1500 images, approximately three percent of his output of 49,000 (44K now held at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, plus 5K lost in the 1937 studio fire).
Norsigian “Lost Negatives of Ansel Adams” report cover, July 2010
Team Norsigian keeps talking about Rick Norsigian’s find — negatives they propose got damaged during that studio fire at Adams’s Yosemite studio in 1937 and subsequently misplaced or discarded — as “filling a gap.” But, to the best of my recollection, no historian of Adams’s work has proposed that the fire created what Team Norsigian’s report refers to as a “critical void,” and Adams himself never used that term to describe the consequences of that fire. Like much in both versions of Team Norsigian’s report, the proposed decades of weeping and wailing over this loss seems purest fiction.
I’ve put a chunk of my own library into storage for a spell, to protect it from an ongoing renovation. So I don’t have ready access to my Adams books. Can any of this blog’s readers check Adams’s autobiography and other sources to see what’s on record about the 1937 studio fire? Specifically:
- Did Adams lose a definable chunk of work — pictures from a particular period, from particular projects, images of particular subjects — or just a mixed and undetermined batch of negatives?
- Did Adams feel he had lost something invaluable, such as negatives of major works, whose destruction he mourned from then on? Team Norsigian asserts that “It was a heartbreaking loss for Adams and his wife, Virginia, and it has long been lamented by the art lovers who have wanted to trace how Adams found his artistic voice in the early phase of his career.” Does any evidence support this?
- What (if anything) did Adams or others have to say about the final disposition of the 5000 negatives damaged beyond salvaging in that conflagration? Where did they go?
Consider this a form of crowdsourcing and/or citizen journalism.
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This post supported in part by a donation from Ellis Vener.
I have the book and scanned it. Chronologically, it jumps around but I saw no mention of the fire, could have missed it. But Adams was filing tax returns and a loss of negatives would have been reflected in his taxes. This would provide a contemporary report of loss and valuation.
Sorry to be so slow to respond, but I missed this discussion back in April. Mary Street Alinders’s biography of Adams describes the fire on pages 143-144. She says he lost 5000 negatives, and that they were mostly commercial work that he had done for Don Tresidder of the Yosemite Park & Curry Company (the Yosemite concessionaire of the era) and his very early pictorialist work, which Alinder called his “soft focus plates”. The negative for “Monolith” was charred at the top edge, and there was some water spot damage to “Clearing Winter Storm”. Edward Weston and his wife Charis were there during the fire, as well as Imogen Cunningham’s son, photographer Rondall Partridge, then Adams’ assistant, who is, I believe, still alive. In conclusion, the losses do not seem to have been of major significance.
Better late than never. Thanks for filling in the narrative with this piece of information. The fact that Adams lost nothing he considered of value goes to very heart of Team Norsigian’s recurrent assertion that the negatives Norsigian owns, if made by Adams, tell us something about him that we don’t already know.