{"id":4560,"date":"2010-08-28T22:34:09","date_gmt":"2010-08-29T02:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=4560"},"modified":"2010-08-28T22:34:09","modified_gmt":"2010-08-29T02:34:09","slug":"cowflop-from-the-adams-herd-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2010\/08\/28\/cowflop-from-the-adams-herd-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Cowflop from the Adams Herd (3)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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"Horse teams on horse shoe curve, Yosemite National Park," 1902. Anonymous snapshot<\/p><\/div>\n

Belatedly, I’ve uncovered another tall tale from William “Wild Bill” Turnage:\u00a0In Lauren A. E. Schuker’s article “Ansel Adams Trove, or a Pile of Glass?”<\/a> in the July 28\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Turnage, managing trustee of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust,\u00a0gets quoted thus: “‘We don’t think they [the 65 glass-plate negatives discovered by Fresno wall painter Rick Norsigian] look like Ansel’s work,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea how many people were photographing Yosemite in the 1920s and 1930s? Millions! It could be anyone.'”<\/p>\n

In fact, according to the official website of Yosemite National Park<\/a>, “Yosemite first hit the 1 million mark [for visitors] in 1954.” In the years tentatively ascribed to these negatives, 1919-1930, attendance would have ranged from 58,362 in 1919 to 498,289\u00a0in 1932, according to National Park Service statistics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What’s important about this whopper isn’t that “Wild Bill” is off by several millions, nor that I checked these facts in five minutes but he couldn’t take the trouble to do so before shooting off his mouth. The evidence so far tells us this isn’t a man concerned with factual accuracy, his own credibility, or the reputation of the Trust he manages. What matters here is the deliberate misdirection embedded within the obvious untruth.<\/p>\n

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S49 Glacier Point, Yosemite Valley, Cal. 5004 Keystone \u00a9 1907 Lingley. Stereo card.<\/p><\/div>\n

Which is this: Even if every single one of the tens of thousands (not millions) visiting Yosemite annually during that period brought a camera and made photographs, only a very limited number of them brought large-format cameras and tripods and glass-plate negatives of the specific (and less common) 6.5″ x 8.5″ size, of which all the Norsigian negatives are examples.<\/p>\n

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Kodak "Brownie" box camera, circa 1900.<\/p><\/div>\n

Large-format\u00a0cameras, bulky to carry and difficult to operate, are not amateur-friendly. (You don’t take those negatives to the drugstore for processing and printing.) The vast majority of the tourists coming to Yosemite during the time period ascribed to these negatives would have brought with them the still-popular handheld box cameras using 120-mm. roll film, such as the Kodak “Brownie” Adams’s parents gave him in 1916 that sparked his interest in photography.<\/p>\n

Other Yosemite visitors who wanted snapshots would have brought compact handheld cameras like the “vest-pocket” Kodaks, the newer 35-mm. rangefinder cameras, or other smaller, lighter, consumer-end instruments. Even many professionals there on assignment would have carried medium-format models, Speed Graphics and such, providing a combination of relative portability with the larger 4×5 negative size.<\/p>\n

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Vest Pocket Kodak, Model B, 1925-34.<\/p><\/div>\n

Those few who did bring large-format cameras would have been either professionals whose assignments and\/or commissions called for even larger negatives, or serious amateur photographers and\u00a0professional creative photographers like Adams making large-format negatives in order to make exhibition-quality prints. Of those, many would already have switched from cumbersome and fragile glass-plate negatives to sheet film, introduced 1913-15, much less heavy and not at all breakable. Glass-plate negatives were on their way out by the 1930s, though still in use by some professionals and advanced amateurs.<\/p>\n

And of the few still using glass-plate negatives (and shlepping them into and around Yosemite), only a fraction would have used the relatively uncommon 6.5″ x 8.5″ size. So the number of people who might have made the Norsigian negatives drops radically when one applies a little common sense and historical knowledge to the situation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Turnage certainly has that historical knowledge, or ready access to it. Either he lacks common sense or else he chose deliberately to muddy the waters with his nonsensical exaggeration. In either case, his proposal that any of “millions” of people could have made those negatives distracts us from the truth \u2014 that only a few dozen people annually would have gone to Yosemite with that combination of camera model and negative. Those people would likely have been known to Adams (and vice versa), would perhaps have checked in at the Adams Gallery to say hello, would in short not have been anywhere near so mysterious and anonymous and untraceable as Turnage would like people to believe.<\/p>\n

Then add in the fact that some of the Norsigian negatives were clearly salvaged from a fire, rewashed to remove soot and ash, then re-sleeved in manila envelopes and wrapped in sheets of 1942-43 newspapers. This further reduces the pool of candidates for production of these plates, leaving us with what I suspect would prove a very small number of prospects \u2014 and Adams, who lost an estimated 5000 negatives (including glass-plate negatives like these) in a 1937 conflagration at his Yosemite studio, certainly counts among them. Consequently, production of these Norsigian negatives by Adams remains the most-likely-case scenario.<\/p>\n

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Collector Rick Norsigian. Image courtesy of Rick Norsigian.<\/p><\/div>\n

Glass doesn’t burn, so Adams disposed in some fashion of the negatives he considered damaged or otherwise dispensable after the fire. Did he smash each and every one to ensure no one could re-use them? Then truck them to the dump? Leave them at the curb for the trash collector? Is it inconceivable that 65 of them \u2014 just a tad over one percent \u2014 somehow survived and got out of Adams’s hands? Not to me.<\/p>\n

Which doesn’t mean I’ve concluded that Adams made the negatives in question. Nor does it mean I’ve concluded that someone other than\u00a0he did. Per my several previous posts, Team Norsigian’s \u201cFinal Report of Investigative Team\u201d<\/a> is laughable in its ineptitude and overreaching, an incompetently researched and badly argued case with more holes than Swiss cheese. Norsigian attorney Arnold Peter asserted, in a public comment on July 17<\/a>, that “on our team was Mr. Patrick Alt who I had the pleasure to work with and learn from. His expertise in this area is beyond reproach.” Alt’s qualifications as Team Norsigian’s “photography expert” have since become a laughing matter, as have the credentials of other Norsigian authenticators.<\/p>\n

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"El Capitan." Image courtesy of Rick Norsigian.<\/p><\/div>\n

Nonetheless, some ineluctable facts remain: These negatives, made by someone with professional-level skills and non-standard photographic equipment and materials, were found in southern California in the 1940s. They portray places where Adams also photographed during the period to which the images date. They were made on a type of negative that Adams also used at the time, and a size of negative, less common than others, that he also used. And they give evidence, in some cases, of having survived a fire, which some of Adams’s negatives also underwent in 1937.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Adams had a studio at Yosemite, a perquisite of his marriage to Virginia Best, whose father had owned the photo concession in the park. This made it easier for Adams than for any other photographer to store unexposed glass-plate negatives there and to transport them around the park for picture-making purposes, as well as to process and print exposed glass-plate negatives without the chore and hazard of transporting them elsewhere. Safe to say, then, that no other photographer has as much access to Yosemite as did Adams, and very few photographers made as many negatives there as he did. No photographer who did so is known (so far) to have lost negatives in a fire.<\/p>\n

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William of Ockham<\/p><\/div>\n

The Occam’s-razor principle \u2014 which suggests that, all things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the correct one \u2014 thus points toward Adams as the author of these works. But Occam’s razor doesn’t equate to credible art world\/photo world authentication. It’s nothing more than likelihood, an educated guess at best. This means that I can see how Team Norsigian got to its jumping-off point, without agreeing that this justifies their subsequent leap of faith and the consequent faith-based assertions that they’ve presented to the world as proven facts.<\/p>\n

So, when “Wild Bill” Turnage pops off fake statistics about how many people could lay claim to these negatives, is he simply running his mouth with his brain out of gear, or is he intentionally misleading the press and public, to distract them from the fact that very few photographers could have made these negatives, and Ansel Adams is high on the list of possibilities? You decide.<\/p>\n

I certainly realize that Turnage et al may prove to be in the right regarding the authorship of these negatives. And I’m reasonably certain they’ll prevail in their legal effort to enjoin Team Norsigian from marketing prints and other products derived from these images. Still, someone has to keep these people honest.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

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Ansel Adams, "Winter Morning, Yosemite Valley, Yosemite Nat'l Park, CA, 1969," Hills Bros. Coffee Can<\/p><\/div>\n

As long as I’m speaking of one cluster of legal questions, let me raise another: By what authority did Ansel Adams come to have Yosemite National Park to himself as a prime marketing location from which he could sell his own prints, books, and workshops for something like five decades \u2014 a most-favored-photographer status enjoyed by no other since?<\/p>\n

After all, we’re not talking about a quasi-saintly figure like Edward Weston, content to live like a hermit on Wildcat Hill and little concerned with making money. We’re talking about the Ansel Adams who cheerfully licensed use of his image “Winter Morning, Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, CA, 1969” for a Hills Bros. Coffee can\u00a0\u2014 an unqualifiedly commercial decision.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And what entitles his descendants, two generations removed, none of them making art, to continue that “tradition” by running a private for-profit gallery on some of the choicest real estate in the entire national park system, for the express purpose of distributing the Adams family product line and other trade goods \u2014 a merchandising privilege enjoyed by no other photographer or photographer’s estate? Was that concession ever put up for public bid, as I’m sure the law nowadays requires? If not, why not? Is this cash cow some exclusive Adams family perk in perpetuity? If so, how come? And if not, isn’t it high time to revisit that contract?<\/p>\n

Just asking.<\/p>\n

(For some backstory from Jim Burnett at National Parks Traveler<\/a> on the concession, whose contract was renewed automatically for another ten years in March 2010, click here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Part 10 of 14:\u00a01<\/a> I\u00a02<\/a> I\u00a03<\/a> I\u00a04<\/a> I\u00a05<\/a> I\u00a06<\/a> I 7<\/a> I\u00a08<\/a> I\u00a09<\/a> I\u00a010 I 11<\/a> I\u00a012<\/a> I\u00a013<\/a> I\u00a014<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By what authority did Ansel Adams come to have Yosemite National Park to himself as a prime marketing location from which he could sell his own prints, books, and workshops for something like five decades \u2014 a most-favored-photographer status enjoyed by no other since? And what entitles his descendants, two generations removed, none of them making art, to continue that tradition by running a private for-profit gallery on some of the choicest real estate in the entire national park system, for the express purpose of distributing the Adams family product line and other trade goods? Is this cash cow some exclusive Adams family perk in perpetuity? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[42,45,54,83,125,203,209,238,406,452],"class_list":["post-4560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-commentary","tag-ansel-adams","tag-ansel-adams-trust","tag-arnold-peter","tag-business-of-art","tag-copyright-law","tag-gelatin-silver-print","tag-glass-plate-negative","tag-intellectual-property","tag-peter-rubin-simon-llp","tag-rick-norsigian","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}