You can’t spend your professional life around practitioners of a given craft without some of their knowledge (including their craft understandings) rubbing off on you; osmosis works. As a result, over the years I’ve allowed what I gleaned in this regard to infiltrate my writing. […]
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Now, even rigorous and thorough research is surely not as conventionally manly and ostentatiously testosterone-validating as wrangling your view camera plus related equipment up some mountain and making your mule your bitch after dinner by the campfire at the summit. So I can see how someone like Jeff Schneider can analogize a mere desk-bound scrivener like myself to “a spoiled, pubescent young girl,” “virgins in their tighty whities who like to throw stones from the safety of their firewalls,” and “a closeted homosexual evangelist.” . . . […] 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. […] 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.” […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (12)
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. […]