Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

Get new posts by email:
Follow me on Mastodon: @adcoleman@hcommons.social     Mastodon logo

Adams Authentication and the CCP (1)

Sometime between 2000 and now the Center for Creative Photography’s policy changed dramatically, though without much fanfare — without any public announcement at all, in fact, unless I missed something. Apparently the CCP has in fact actively gotten into the Ansel Adams authentication business. This new service goes unmentioned in the Center’s mission statement, its online FAQs, or anywhere else at its website. Yet it’s now a “normal activity” at the Center — and, I gather, provided to one and all as a courtesy. When did this significant change comes about, and who’s responsible for it? […]

Open Letter to the Adams Trust

William Turnage has disgraced and betrayed the Adams Trust, publicly embarrassing that entity. He has recklessly endangered the reputations of four substantial enterprises: the Adams Trust, the Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona, and the Ansel Adams Gallery. Perhaps most significantly of all, under Turnage’s leadership the Trust has not only besmirched itself but damaged the reputation and abused the name of Ansel Adams in the guise of protecting it. Turnage has made himself into a high-profile liability the Adams Trust and its partner institutions can no longer afford. […]

Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (18)

The saga of Rick Norsigian and his yard-sale negatives took some intriguing turns during my 2½-week hiatus October 31-November 18. Most notable, surely, was the initiation of Melinda Pillsbury-Foster’s extensive documentation supporting claims on behalf of her grandfather, the photographer, filmmaker, inventor, lecturer, and author Arthur C. Pillsbury as the maker of the negatives in the Norsigian Collection. From my preliminary perusal of the documentation they’ve assembled, Pillsbury qualifies at least for serious consideration for potential authorship of the Norsigian Collection negatives. […]

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 (16)

As Team Norsigian says in the press release accompanying the “Report on Earl Brooks,” “proper authentication is the key to this mystery.” The ball’s in their court insofar as initiating such authentication goes. But they’d sooner save the appearances by rushing about looking busy with unnecessary made work like this pointless report on Brooks. […]