It appears that while there were no questions in Alt’s mind about Adams’s creation of these negatives a year ago, such questions have belatedly entered said mind. What happened to Ansel Adams’s style in these photographs avowedly being “so distinct, you could just feel him in the room”? Not even an “Oops”? Like Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella, Alt has seemingly persuaded himself that he can switch sides in this situation without admitting that his previous statements were erroneous, unfounded, and misleading. […]
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I was . . . retained not as a research historian. . ., but [for] my encyclopedic knowledge of cameras, lenses, and the more technical aspects of the plates. . . . 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. […] Amping up the bogosity and racing headlong toward a “goes to 11” mindset, Team Norsigian has apparently decided to sidetrack itself by investing some of its seemingly boundless energies in discrediting the “Uncle” Earl Brooks Theory of provenance for the Norsigian negatives. (Bogosity: “the state or condition of being bogus.”) Toward that end, they’ve dug up an online source for a small trove of Brooks’s commercial work, 81 images in all, presently housed in the Hagley Digital Archives in Wilmington, Delaware. […] The only people keeping the truth about these negatives from the public are Rick Norsigian and Arnold Peter. By their staunch long-term resistance to engaging any recognized researcher in the field of photography history and conservation — dozens if not hundreds of whom accept such commissions regularly on behalf of private, corporate, and institutional collections — to submit these negatives to scrutiny and testing, they conspire to keep this “controversy” going and ensure that no hard forensic data gets produced. […] |
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Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (13)
Patrick Alt thus failed Team Norsigian in every significant way. Of everyone in this crew, he was in the best position to ensure the production of hard evidence to support what otherwise constitutes mostly extrapolation, assumption, and hypothesis — or to bow out. He did neither, instead boarding the “lost Adams negatives” bandwagon and urging it forward (for hire, not pro bono, I remind the reader). […]