{"id":6432,"date":"2010-12-27T22:44:35","date_gmt":"2010-12-28T02:44:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=6432"},"modified":"2010-12-27T22:44:35","modified_gmt":"2010-12-28T02:44:35","slug":"adams-authentication-and-the-ccp-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2010\/12\/27\/adams-authentication-and-the-ccp-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Adams Authentication and the CCP (3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Center<\/a>As noted in previous posts in this series<\/a>, sometime circa November 15, 2010 the Center for Creative Photography apparently planted a story in the Arizona Daily Wildcat<\/em>, the supposedly independent newspaper of the University of Arizona-Tucson. The story,\u00a0\u201cAnsel Adams authenticated: Center for Creative Photography verifies claims of original works,\u201d<\/a> appeared in the Wildcat<\/em> issue datelined\u00a0November 23, 2010, under the byline of cub reporter Rebecca Rillos.<\/p>\n

\"Rebecca<\/a>

Rebecca Senf<\/p><\/div>\n

I say the CCP “apparently planted” this because the story, which spells out the protocols for what the CCP calls “authentication consults” provided to people who believe they have Ansel Adams material, has no news angle serving as the occasion for its publication. That is, it doesn’t announce a new service provided by the CCP; Rillos’s primary source for this report, Rebecca Senf, acting senior curator for the CCP, states that this process has gone on long enough to become a \u201cnormal activity\u201d for the CCP. Nor does the story spring from some notable recent occurrence of this “authentication consult” procedure at work. Indeed, the absence from this account of any single identified instance of the initiation and outcome of such a “consult,” whether it resulted in authentication or invalidation of the material, is striking.<\/p>\n

\"Rebecca<\/a>

Rebecca Rillos<\/p><\/div>\n

In my experience as a cultural journalist, such a story rarely gets instigated by the journalist who writes it, since there’s nothing immediate or visible to draw the journalist’s attention to the subject. (E.g., someone’s discovery of a stash of Ansel’s passionate, X-rated love letters to Nancy Newhall, newly validated as such by the CCP.) It reads like a story fed to the reporter by the source, who’s using the reporter as a mouthpiece and the periodical as a platform. Not uncommonly, such story ideas get presented to newbie journalists (Rillos is a UofA sophomore), who won’t know the difficult questions to ask. I’m prepared to stand corrected if Rillos claims she stumbled upon this free service offered at the Center and proposed it to her editor without prompting by the CCP, but until then I’ll assume the CCP decided, for its own reasons, to make this service public by setting up Rillos’s interview with Senf, on which the story is based.<\/p>\n

\"Arizona<\/a>Clearly Senf spoke to Rillos on the record and of her own volition, in her capacity as acting senior curator for the CCP. Since neither Senf nor the CCP have issued any corrections, demanded any retractions, or repudiated the Wildcat<\/em> story more than a month after it first saw print, we can take it as an official public position statement by the CCP. As such, we can also assume the story had the approval of the CCP’s director, Katharine Martinez; the CCP’s Board of Fellows, which oversees the Center’s activities; Carla J. Stoffle, Dean of Libraries and the Center for Creative Photography at the the University of Arizona-Tucson\u00a0(to whom Martinez reports); and William “Wild Bill” Turnage, managing trustee of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, who, as we now know, dictates CCP policy and procedures<\/a> behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

It’s highly unusual, indeed irregular, for any museum or archive to get involved in the activity of authenticating works of art or any other kind of material. Consider the following relevant policies from two other U.S. institutions from two different coasts, randomly chosen:<\/p>\n

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