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. . . . […]
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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. […] 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. […] I haven’t seen the new romantic comedy featuring Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, Going the Distance. However, as it happens, I’ve spent some time working on the treatment of a script that’s even more far-fetched, so to speak, hoping that Hollywood’s ready for it. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (11)
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. […]