Who was J Dudley Johnston, and why did this Royal Photographic Society award I received get named after him? Pam Roberts described him as “a link between photographers of all countries and all persuasions, a visionary and a man with a passion for research and for dissemination of information.” […]
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On September 9 I received the J Dudley Johnston Award for Writing about Photography, conferred on me by the Royal Photographic Society (U.K.) at its Annual Awards gala. I take particular pleasure in the fact that this comes as unsolicited peer recognition. . . . […] 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. […] How this news of Ernest C. Withers’s complicity with the F.B.I. will affect public and critical regard for his work I can’t say. The revelation doesn’t invalidate the work he did as a documentarian and photojournalist, but it surely nuances my response to know that he was slipping prints of some of these images, and other documents, and verbal information to his handlers on the sly. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Guest Post 7: Patrick Alt on the Norsigian/Adams Negatives
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. […]