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Norsigian/Adams: Game Over?

The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, PRS Media Partners, LLC and Rick Norsigian appear to have decided to bury the hatchets ― or at least to have achieved a Mexican standoff. They’ve asked the Court to dismiss the Trust’s complaint and Team Norsigian’s counterclaim without prejudice. A spokesperson for Team Norsigian has assured me that (a) the team’s authentication efforts will continue ― under the guidance of recognized experts, one hopes, and involving strict forensic testing ― and (b) that they will continue to press their lawsuit against the University of Arizona-Tucson charging illegal civil conspiracy. […]

Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (19)

Going full-steam-ahead into Year Two of the brouhaha over “the lost negatives of Ansel Adams,” Team Norsigian has added the University of Arizona as a defendant in its countersuit against the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. This inclusion of the UofA in the countersuit comes as no surprise. In fall 2010 Arnold Peter, legal counsel for Rick Norsigian, forced the disclosure of a chain of email correspondence between William “Wild Bill” Turnage, Managing Trustee of the Adams Trust, and various functionaries at the Center for Creative Photography and the UofA (which houses the CCP). That correspondence makes it absolutely clear that Turnage blackmailed the CCP’s newly installed director, Katharine Martinez, into reluctantly signing an inappropriate and prejudicial public statement discrediting Norsigian’s claims regarding the glass-plate negatives he bought at a yard sale in Fresno and has attributed to Ansel Adams. […]

Adams Authentication and the CCP (2)

According to a press release dated last Friday, on December 16, 2010, Richard “Rick” Norsigian and PRS Media Partners “publicly announced the filing of a counterclaim against the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. The primary allegations of the four-count suit involve claims for slander and civil conspiracy.” I’ve indicated previously that I fully expect the Adams Trust to prevail in its trademark-violation suit against Norsigian and PRS Media Partners. Yet it’s no contradiction to say that it wouldn’t surprise me if the letter consortium prevailed in its countersuit. […]

Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (17)

This story begins to feel like a rabbit hole, a sinkhole, a black hole — or some combination of those phenomena. Like the irascible diagnostician Dr. Gregory House of the eponymous TV series, I want to lurch to my chalkboard so as to scribble mad notes with interconnecting arrows all over it. Or lay about me with my cane. Or take some serious painkillers. Preferably all three. At once. As Bob Dylan sings, “The people just get uglier, and I have no sense of time.” […]

Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (15)

With the woebegone “art expert” David W. Streets, another original member of the team, now thoroughly discredited, and with the team’s “photography expert” Patrick Alt having recently started to change his mind about Adams’s authorship of the negatives (after earlier concluding his active involvement with Team Norsigian’s campaign), said cohort presently includes no one with any knowledge of photography or art. Not surprisingly, that ignorance is all over this report, whose announced purpose is the debunking of any attribution of these negatives to Earl Brooks. […]