![\"A.](\"http:\/\/74.220.207.133\/~nearbyca\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/A._C._Pillsbury_portrait3.jpg\" "\\"A._C._Pillsbury_portrait\\"")
<\/a>A. C. Pillsbury, n.d.<\/p><\/div>\n
1. 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. Pillsbury bought his first Yosemite studio in 1897, and, as a photographer, had an ongoing relationship to the park thereafter. Eventually he ran a large Yosemite photo studio from 1924-27.<\/p>\n
According to the timeline published at\u00a0the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation’s website<\/a>, in 1924 Pillsbury received a 20-year concession for his Studio of the Three Arrows in Yosemite’s New Village. “New Studio is large, including a theater which holds 250 people for nature movies.”\u00a0That studio burned down under mysterious circumstances just a few years later, on November 4, 1927. Pillsbury lost all his negatives in that fire, never returned to the site to salvage anything therefrom, and abandoned his Yosemite enterprise.<\/p>\n A. C. Pillsbury, "Leaning Pine on Sentinel Dome," photo postcard, n.d. Courtesy of Marillynne Guske<\/p><\/div>\n At the time, a much smaller photography\/art studio next door to Pillsbury’s, founded in 1902, was run by the photographer\/painter Harry Best and his wife Anne, parents of Virginia Best, whom Ansel Adams married on January 2, 1928 \u2014\u00a0two months after the Pillsbury fire. The wedding took place “in the newly constructed Best’s Studio in the ‘new village’ in Yosemite Valley,” according to\u00a0the official history of the gallery<\/a> as posted at the website of the Ansel Adams Gallery. “Harry Best passed away in 1936, and Virginia inherited the business that she had been running for some years,” the same source indicates. Best’s Studio eventually became the Ansel Adams Gallery, turning Yosemite National Park into Adams’s private fiefdom and cash cow \u2014 one that, apparently, he somehow became entitled to pass along to his heirs and assigns to enjoy in perpetuity<\/a>.<\/p>\n Melinda Pillsbury-Foster portrait<\/p><\/div>\n Pillsbury’s the alternative candidate for production of the Norsigian negatives at whose existence I hinted back in October. While\u00a0Reyhan Harmanci’s November 9 story for the NY Times<\/em>, \u201cAnsel Adams or Not? More Twists,\u201d<\/a> introduced Pillsbury to the broader journalistic coverage of this story, the journalist Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, working in tandem with the Chicago-based photographer and collector Charlotte Anjelica Kieltyka, has produced and begun to post at the Pillsbury Foundation’s website an already substantial and rapidly growing documentation of Pillsbury’s life as a photographer and inventor, including numerous close comparisons between Norsigian negatives and known Pillsbury images. For those willing to pore over detailed research, I highly recommend Pillsbury-Foster’s ongoing account. (The best place to start is here.<\/a>)<\/p>\n I’ll have more to say about Pillsbury once I have a chance to absorb this material. I’ll refer to the Pillsbury-Foster\/Kieltyka partnership henceforth as\u00a0the Pillsbury Doughgirls.\u00a0From my preliminary perusal of the documentation they’ve assembled, Pillsbury qualifies at least for serious consideration for potential authorship of the Norsigian Collection negatives.<\/p>\n Earl Brooks, "Self-Portrait," n.d.<\/p><\/div>\n 2. Then there’s Brooke Delarco’s evidence that her grandfather, Earl Brooks, another leading candidate for the production of the Norsigian Collection negatives,\u00a0wasn’t just a studio photographer. Substantiation for this claim comes from Brooks’s great-grandson Cameron Horne, who inherited “the photographer\u2019s 673-page unpublished memoir, as well as diaries and photo albums,” according to Reyhan Harmanci’s “Ansel Adams or Not? More Twists”<\/a> in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, November 9, 2010. (In his coverage of this development, a November 2 piece titled “Ansel Adams, Earl Brooks share top billing in show on Yosemite photography since the 1860s,\u201d<\/a> Mike Boehm of the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em> indicates that the memoir bears the title “The Story of Earl Brooks and His Time, or 73 Years into the 20th Century by Earl Brooks Himself.\u201d)<\/p>\n Earl Brooks in Yosemite Park, 1914. From his journal. Courtesy Brooke Delarco.<\/p><\/div>\n “One of the albums,” Harmanci continues, “contains an image that matches one of Mr. Norsigian\u2019s negatives. In his writing, Mr. Brooks also talks about his use of glass negatives, a skill the Norsigian team had said they doubted he possessed.” This means that Team Norsigian counsel Arnold Peter’s October 8, 2010\u00a0“Report on Earl Brooks,”<\/a> which I’ve already deconstructed<\/a>, has developed yet another hole.<\/p>\n I’m not alone in awaiting full disclosure \u2014 online, preferably, as is happening with the Pillsbury materials \u2014\u00a0by Delarco of the photos, letters, journals, and other memorabilia left by her grandfather. This has begun to trickle out, but isn’t yet widely enough available to enable more than a few select individuals to examine it. (Myself not among them. What am I, chopped liver?)<\/p>\n 3. Last, but surely not least, we have the interim decision of the Federal District Court of Northern in the case of\u00a0“The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust v. PRS Media Partners, LLC et al,”<\/a> which seeks to enjoin Team Norsigian from continuing to sell prints from negatives they’ve claimed Ansel Adams made. (This is Case Number 3:2010cv03740, filed on August 23, 2010 in the California Northern District Court, San Francisco; the presiding judge now is Jeffrey White.) It’s an intellectual property\/trademark-violation suit; Adams’s name is trademarked. I consider it a slam-dunk for the Adams Trust, on the merits, and would expect a judge to see it that way.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, for reasons I can’t fathom, the Adams Trust has demanded a jury trial. Truly is it said of hubristic types like managing trustee William “Wild Bill” Turnage, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” A jury trial will allow Team Norsigian to pull out all the stops, put Rick Norsigian on the stand as working-class David to the Adams Trust’s fat-cat Goliath, trot out its lineup of questionable experts, and parade around its assertions of censorship and the public right to know.<\/p>\n Arnold Peter, Esq.<\/p><\/div>\n The censorship ploy \u2014 a\u00a0claim by Peter\u00a0to first-amendment protection for selling prints made from those negatives \u2014 strikes me as a desperation move. Peter’s filing claims that this controversy is “a matter of great public concern” that deserves “a robust debate.” As if it isn’t provoking that debate now, and as if that would cease perforce if convicted felon and Beverly Hills gallerist David W. Streets<\/a> had to desist from hawking those prints.<\/p>\n Stopping Team Norsigian from marketing its Adams-branded product line doesn’t in any way interfere with Team Norsigian identifying the maker of the negatives, or with the ongoing debate; witness my regular posts and the vigorous comments appended thereto at this very blog. A judge would see through this argument in a Bay Area minute, and put a stop to it; a jury just might buy it.<\/p>\n William Turnage, managing trustee, Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust<\/p><\/div>\n According to Maria Dinzeo’s report,\u00a0“Judge Vacates Hearing in Ansel Adams Case,”<\/a> published by Courthouse News Service on November 15, 2010, “The trust had planned to call a handwriting expert, a San Francisco art gallery owner [doubtless Scott Nichols] and Adams’ former assistant and biographer [Mary Alinder] to testify against Norsigian at the hearing.”\u00a0I can’t imagine what relevance the Adams Trust thinks any of those people would have had to a trademark-violation suit. Wisely avoiding the sending in of the clowns, at least at this early stage, Judge White “canceled [the scheduled Nov. 12] hearing, saying he can decide on the viability of the lawsuit without oral argument from attorneys. . . . Judge White did not indicate when he will issue a ruling.”<\/p>\n Note: This will be a ruling on Team Norsigian’s motion to dismiss the suit, not a final ruling in the case itself. That may take many more months, especially if it involves a jury trial. (For Dinzeo’s earlier report on the progress of this suit,\u00a0“Ansel Adams Trust Argues Its Case,”<\/a> Courthouse News Service, October 21, 2010, click this link. Backtracking even further, here’s Reyhan Harmanci’s August 23 story in the Bay Citizen<\/em>, “Ansel Adams Trust Files Suit.”<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n Surely enough there to keep Team Norsigian attorney Arnold Peter busy, especially since he lacks photography expertise himself, has no one now in his posse with that knowledge base, and thus has no way to respond knowledgeably to the Brooks and Pillsbury materials. Moreover, we’ve yet to see anything resembling hard evidence from Team Norsigian to buttress its own assertions. No forensic test results on even a single glass-plate negative. No comparison by a skilled and recognized photo researcher of the Norsigian negatives to coterminous Adams negatives at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. No hard and convincing proof of their claims, not to put too fine a point on it. Peter won’t get further on that score until he brings on board someone with recognized credentials in photo research and photo history. His own commentaries on matters photographic are painful to read; be very afraid that he’s working on more of the same.<\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n Attorney Manny Medrano<\/p><\/div>\n On November 19 I sent the following email to Manny Medrano. On the same day, I left a voicemail message at Medrano’s office soliciting his response. These were follow-ups to a previous email I’d sent him (a slight variant of the one below) on October 11, 2010.\u00a0Medrano, self-described at\u00a0his own website<\/a> as “Speaker – Journalist – Attorney,”\u00a0signed on as Team Norsigian’s “evidence and burden-of-proof expert” for the authentication of the negatives in the Norsigian Collection as the output of Ansel Adams.<\/p>\n Dear Mr. Medrano:<\/em><\/p>\n I’m writing to you again in relation to your role as a member of “Team Norsigian,” the cohort that in late July 2010 authenticated 65 negatives found by Rick Norsigian at a yard sale as the work of the late master photographer Ansel Adams.<\/em><\/p>\n As you’re probably aware, I’ve tracked this story at my blog, <\/em>Photocritic International, since late July. <\/em>You’ll find links to all my posts on this subject here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n You’re quoted in Team Norsigian’s published report, <\/em>“The Lost Negatives of Ansel Adams,”<\/em><\/a> as follows:<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI have sent people to prison, for the rest of their lives, for far less evidence than I have seen in this case. In my view, those photographs were done by Ansel Adams.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n As you’ve probably learned, one of Team Norsigian’s “art experts,” the Beverly Hills dealer David W. Streets, has now been <\/em>revealed as a convicted felon and known fraudster<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Team Norsigian’s second “art expert,” art dealer Robert C. Moeller III, <\/em>has fully recanted his attribution of these negatives<\/em><\/a>, switching instead to the so-called “Uncle” Earl Brooks Theory.<\/em><\/p>\n And Norsigian’s “photo expert,” photographer and antique-camera repairman Patrick Alt, delared as follows last month, in <\/em>a post at my blog<\/em><\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n “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\u2019s integrity and his long history with Ansel and if it is good enough for John, I think I should follow his lead.”<\/em><\/p>\n Alt, as reported in <\/em>a recent <\/em><\/a>Los Angeles Times<\/a> story<\/em><\/a>, has since indicated that he’s now only “80% convinced” that the negatives were made by Adams.<\/em><\/p>\n I assume you’ll agree that, if this were a legal case, the side on which you’ve placed yourself would be in deep trouble, with its expert witnesses either discredited or recanting (or both). Certainly you’d have trouble sending someone to prison on this basis. So I’m wondering if you have any public comment to make about all this.<\/em><\/p>\n I’ll be glad to offer you space at my blog, in the form of a Guest Post, if you want to comment at length. I simply publish such posts as written by my guests; they become the main page of my blog for several days, then get archived and indexed so that they remain available indefinitely. <\/em>You’ll find Alt’s here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n If you have a shorter comment, I can incorporate that into an upcoming post of my own. Or, if you would prefer to respond in a form such as an email q&a, we can set that in motion.<\/em><\/p>\n I look forward to hearing from you on this at your earliest convenience.<\/em><\/p>\n Best wishes,<\/em><\/p>\n A. D. Coleman<\/em><\/p>\n No response to date \u2014 or, in standard journalese, Mr. Medrano was not available for comment at press time, despite repeated attempts to contact him.\u00a0Come out, come out, wherever you are, Manny Medrano.<\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>