Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Pacific Telesis also underwrote the catalog, a record of all seventy­-five Museum Set images with an essay on the set by Cikovsky and another on Ansel by Jim, who contributed a detailed chronology as well. A year later, it was reissued by Little, Brown in slightly different form, under the title Classic Images.7

  When Ansel died, we were just finishing the second set of deluxe posters, this time of Monolith, Frozen Lake and Cliffs, and Winter Sunrise. Dave Gardner’s reproductions had been fully approved by Ansel, but he had not yet signed them. We had AA’s initials embossed in place of the signature.

  Although I again protested, this time to the trustees rather than to Ansel himself, by 1987 a desk calendar had joined the lengthening Ansel Adams publishing list. As much as I loved Ansel’s work, I thought it was proliferating ridiculously. Still, every time I began preparing for a new edition of either calendar, I would find myself once again caught up in the joy of working with his photographs. Each spring I would lay out my proposed calendar images and ask everyone present in the house to comment: Phyllis, Fumiye, Chris, Rod, our bookkeeper Judy Siria, and especially Virginia. (Phyllis is now a very active eighty-nine-year-old. Fumiye and Rod have passed away. Chris’s photographs of indigenous cultures and his work for National Geographic have propelled him to be one of the most respected expressive documentary photographers.) I respected all their opinions, and with Ansel no longer physically around, I wanted them to feel a part of each publishing project, much as I might later wish I hadn’t: criticism is easier to request than to accept.

  Next I buried myself in the sand, in the form of Ansel Adams: Letters and Images. I knew the letters backward and forward from my years of research for the autobiography, and I had memorized parts of some that I found especially moving. Our publisher cautioned that books of correspondence were neither sexy nor potential bestsellers. But I hoped that in this case those rules would not apply, because Ansel’s letters were uncommonly wonderful.

  Andrea, now living in New York with her new husband, was my coeditor. She and I agreed that the letters should tell their own story, so we included some to Ansel as well as from him, reasoning that this would better communicate the quality of his relationships with such greats as Stieglitz, Weston, Strand, and the Newhalls, along with presidents and senators. We imposed as little of our own editorial presence as possible. Through the careful chronological sequencing of letters, whole stories naturally developed intact, allowing the reader to experience firsthand the making of photographic and environmental history—to my mind, exciting stuff. This approach necessitated the elimination of some important, although not crucial, events and friendships. Other decisions were made for more delicate reasons; for example, because Ansel had declined to mention his romantic wanderings in the autobiography, we included no letters to Patsy English. The book is an excellent read, but as Little, Brown had warned, there was far less interest in it than there had been in his memoir.

  The proofs arrived for the letters book in May 1988. It was my duty to read them with attention to every detail, from typos to dust spots in the reproductions, and make any last-second changes. Signing off on these was the final job I was contracted to complete. I finished, shipped the bluelines to Dave Gardner, left the Trust’s employ, and crashed, falling into a eighteen-month-long depression, an unbelievable turn of events for someone known as Little Mary Sunshine. I had not let up since I had begun working for Ansel almost a decade earlier. I had had no idea that I was under such extraordinary stress.

  Ansel Adams: Letters and Images was the last book personally planned by Ansel. Since then, the AAPRT has launched a steady stream of new Adams titles: The American Wilderness, 1990; Our National Parks, 1992; The Ansel Adams Guide: Basic Techniques, 1992; Ansel Adams in Color, 1993; Yosemite and the High Sierra, 1994; Yosemite, 1995; Ansel Adams: California, 1997; The Grand Canyon and the Southwest, 2000; Ansel Adams at 100, 2001; Ansel Adams: Trees, 2004; Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, 2006; Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs, 2007; Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities, 2008; Ansel Adams in the National Parks, 2010; Looking at Ansel Adams, 2012; and Ansel Adams in the Canadian Rockies, 2013. Ansel Adams is still a big business.

  Ansel’s posters, wall calendars, and engagement calendars appear dependably each year. Since they began in 1984, the wall calendars had sold more than five million copies by 2013, averaging more than one hundred thousand every year.8 Ansel’s images may be the most widely available and frequently purchased by any visual artist in history.

  In celebration of his hundredth birthday in 2002, PBS aired the ninety-minute Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film, written and directed by Ric Burns. I talked with his staff many times over the months before shooting and then made a brief appearance in the movie. Somehow Burns missed the mark. Slow-paced, with a background of slow, somber music—none of those qualities reflect Ansel. Ansel was a live wire, fueled with abundant and productive energy, the life of the party, the first and the last with a joke, not the meditative old man of the mountain as portrayed in this documentary.

  The year 2002 marked the beginning of a difficult cascade of events. I received an excited telephone call from a Mr. Rick Norsigian. A year earlier he had bought two boxes containing sixty-five glass-plate negatives at a flea market. He was told that they had been discovered in an abandoned warehouse in Los Angeles. Norsigian had read the first edition of this book, my biography of Ansel, and with what he learned he concluded that he had found some long-lost Ansel Adams negatives. I told him to send me a letter with photocopies of everything he had and I would get back to him. He wrote that the negatives measured six and a half by eight and a half inches, and their negative envelopes bore dates ranging from 1923 to 1931. Ansel’s Korona view camera, his favorite from 1923 until about 1929—the one that he used to make Monolith—required that identical size of glass plate. Norsigian also sent a glossy proof sheet with thirty-seven small black-and-white 35mm contact prints (one by one and a half inches), mostly of Yosemite with a few seascapes and a couple from Carmel. The negative envelopes had been dated and titled in more than one hand. I looked at everything he sent with a completely open mind. After years of haunting flea markets, Norsigian believed he had found a one-in-a-million treasure. Employed as a painter in the maintenance department for the Fresno public school system, he was hoping for an Antiques Roadshow home run. Here was a tale that would warm hearts everywhere, an underdog finally becoming a top dog.9

  I found his evidence to be a very mixed bag and told him so. How did these glass plates get to Los Angeles? Norsigian believed it was when Ansel taught there at the Art Center School in 1942–1943. However, Ansel was extremely protective of his negatives. Norsigian said that some of the glass plates appeared to be singed by flames and we know that had happened to Monolith in Ansel’s 1937 darkroom fire. Following that conflagration, Ansel moved his negatives to a bank vault in San Francisco. It would not be in character for Ansel to have left negatives anywhere. I repeated to him what he had surely read in the Ansel biography, that it was essential for Ansel to not only make the negative but each print as well. Prints made by others from potential Adams negatives held little value.

  While some of the images looked Ansel-like, and certainly he had photographed the same Yosemite subjects, most didn’t quite meet the mark. Ansel was very fussy about the edges of his negatives, even back in the 1920s. He conscientiously framed each negative so that messy grasses or errant tree limbs did not impede into the image area. One of Norsigian’s negatives was of the famed Jeffrey pine that stood for decades on top of Yosemite’s Sentinel Dome, but Ansel’s well-known similar image had been made in 1940, and probably many thousands of people had made almost identical pictures until the tree died in 1977 and crashed to the ground in 2013.10 Another proof was of the same view that millions of people photograph from the parking lot overlooking the valley’s south end, the quintessential dramatic view of Yosemite, with Bridalveil Fall on the right and El Capitan on the left. One image from Carme
l captured a tall skinny man clad in black, topped with a big hat. Under a magnifying glass I felt sure it was not Ansel, as Norsigian claimed. The seascapes did not look like anything Ansel would have made.

  I thought a few of the envelopes could bear Virginia’s handwriting, although I reminded Norsigian that she worked at her father’s studio all during the 1920s where they represented work by a number of photographers. I also stated that I had no expertise in handwriting analysis. Generally the images had beautiful tones, and that was the most Ansel-like aspect. I wrote to Norsigian and told him that I was baffled. Over the next few months I advised him to contact a number of other experts, including Mike and Jeanne Adams and Ron Partridge, Ansel’s assistant at the time of the darkroom fire.11

  Norsigian kept plugging away, in his persistence pushing too hard. Mike and Jeanne visited him and viewed the actual prints and negatives. They concluded that they were not by Ansel and they also did not think that any of the handwriting was by Virginia. Archivists at Ansel’s archive at the Center for Creative Photography found no matches between Norsigian’s negatives and the forty thousand proofs of every Ansel negative and thousands of fine prints that they hold. Coupled with my own doubts, I agreed with them that Norsigian’s negatives had not been made by Ansel.

  I received a string of plaintive e-mails from Norsigian. When in 2004 he offered me 25 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the negatives if I would authenticate them, I saw it as a naive gesture.12 I declined kindly but firmly. Ansel had taught me everything I could learn from him, freely and generously. People come to me all the time to answer questions about Ansel and I have always answered them without charge. I also advised him that if the Center could not identify them and Michael and Jeanne said they weren’t by Ansel, I would trust them.13

  Another e-mail arrived from Norsigian requesting one thousand dollars to pay his handwriting expert.14 When I declined, in further e-mails he accused, “This is getting close to conspiracy and fraud.”15 I replied that he was rude and ended with, “In my past emails I have told you everything I know. I have not charged you a penny for my scholarship. You should just say thank you and leave it at that.”16 I stopped responding to his e-mails. His final e-mail that year ended with what I felt was a warning that he would appear at one of my lectures to debate me from the audience.17

  Norsigian’s last e-mail arrived in October 2009. He asked for forgiveness for things he had said and written and advised that it was not too late for me to give him my support. He claimed that the negatives had been authenticated and this would soon be announced at a major press conference. He had hired a team of “experts”—not one being an expert in Ansel’s work.18 This seemed fishy to me.

  Norsigian’s negatives found representation at an art gallery in Beverly Hills whose owner, one David W. Streets (no relation to me), claimed their value to be two hundred million dollars. Norsigian was now represented by an attorney who explained, “The $200 million represents several sources of revenue over an extended period of time—reprints, licensing, eventual sale of the negatives.”19 Ansel’s grandson, Matt, representing the family and the Ansel Adams Gallery, reacted forcefully. “The number of $200 million that has been suggested by the Norsigian team is ludicrous. It should be remembered that while there is a good deal of creativity and purpose in the negative, the print is the expression of the artist’s intent. It is the print that carries the value.”20 But still, the story took off like wildfire, reported as the truth all around the world. My phone began ceaselessly ringing with queries from reporters. The news hit all the national networks except CBS. I had convinced them that all the true Ansel Adams authorities had decided these were not by him.

  Very soon, Norsigian’s house of cards began tumbling. An eighty-seven-year-old woman in Oakland saw some of the pictures on the TV news and said that she “about fell off the sofa.”21 She was sure they were by her Uncle Earl. Indeed, investigation by Ansel’s former assistants, John Sexton and Alan Ross, showed that at least some of Norsigian’s pictures had definitely been made with her Uncle Earl Brooks’s camera.22 Brooks had photographed in California in the early to mid-1920s. Other negatives appeared to have been the work of photographer Arthur C. Pillsbury who owned the well-known studio Pillsbury’s Pictures in Yosemite for twenty-four years, from 1906 to 1930. He and his team sold classic scenic views of Yosemite, as well as camera equipment, to tourists. The A. C. Pillsbury Foundation asserts that both Ansel and Earl Brooks attended photo workshops at Pillsbury’s Pictures, possibly at the same time.23

  Next it was revealed that David W. Streets was a convicted felon for petty theft and fraud in Kentucky and Louisiana. When he opened his Beverly Hills gallery in 2009, he claimed he had over twenty-five years of experience and was “Los Angeles’ leading appraiser of all genres of fine art and celebrity memorabilia.”24 The owner of the art gallery in New Orleans where he had worked as a salesman said he could be “very charming,” but when he was hired in 2000, he had no experience as an appraiser. In 2004 Streets was “demoted” by the owners and then quit.25

  Norsigian and his attorney established a website to sell “authentic” Ansel Adams limited edition prints made from the “Lost Negatives” for $7,500 for “hand-developed” prints, $1,500 for digital copies, and $45 for posters.26 (One can buy an authenticated, original Ansel Adams photograph, printed and signed by Ansel, for less than $7,500.)

  The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust and Norsigian sued and countersued each other. (Norsigian’s suit against the University of Arizona was dismissed.)27 The AAPRT and Norsigian’s contingent settled out of court. While each had to pay their own legal fees, Norsigian agreed to clearly state on his website that “merchandise sold through this website . . . is sold as is with no representation or warranty of authenticity as a work by Ansel Adams.”28

  As of January 2014, the telephone at the David W. Streets Gallery was disconnected. Norsigian’s website, “The Lost Photographs,” continues. If one orders a print (now being offered for as much as $800 for a twenty-by-twenty-four-inch limited edition and “hand-numbered” gelatin silver print, or as low as $90 for a sixteen-by-twenty-inch digital print), one is sent directly to PayPal. After all of this, I have never thought that Rick Norsigian was a bad person, but someone so caught up in his own dreams that he was easily scammed by unscrupulous people and not wise enough to stop when the evidence was right before him.

  What did Ansel and the great jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck have in common? It turns out to be a lot. Brubeck was northern Californian born and bred and considered Yosemite a personal touchstone. For years he had marveled at Ansel’s images of that great valley and the surrounding Sierra. Deeply moved to discover in Ansel’s autobiography that he had begun as a pianist, Brubeck wrote a twenty-two-minute piano composition. Working closely with his son, Chris, this was expanded into a full symphonic score. As Brubeck described it, “[Ansel] loved Bach and Chopin, so I’ve incorporated Chopin-esque kind of piano playing and Bach kind of piano playing into the piece. And it’s a tug of war between the camera and the piano that I’m trying to depict.”29

  Performed with a procession of one hundred of Ansel’s images projected behind the orchestra, Ansel Adams: America premiered at Lincoln Center in New York City and has been since presented at a number of other venues. The Temple University Symphony recorded the composition in 2012, and on December 5 of that year its nomination for a Grammy for Best Instrumental Recording was announced. Dave Brubeck had died a few hours earlier at the age of eighty-eight.30

  Following Ansel’s death in 1984, the Friends of Photography was still housed in two rooms at Carmel’s Sunset Center and a rental space a block away. The Friends’ board of directors, led by Peter C. Bunnell, decided that this was an opportunity to honor Ansel with a permanent museum and education center.31 Jim was charged with spearheading a multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign in addition to his duties as executive director. A site on the Monterey Peninsula was found and an architectural c
ompetition held, but the timing proved to be bad. In October 1984, six months after Ansel’s death, the Monterey Bay Aquarium opened. An overwhelming popular success, beyond any expectations, the entire Monterey Peninsula experienced gridlock for weeks at a time. Necessary civic support to add another “tourist” attraction evaporated. The Ansel Adams Center was not going to happen there.

  The Friends’ board split into two factions: those who insisted on moving to Los Angeles and those demanding it be in San Francisco. Ansel’s birthplace won. With the help of Deputy Mayor and Friends’ trustee Peter Henschel, a site was found at Pier One at Fort Mason. The space was large and affordable, although it would take time for seismic retrofitting. That delay, combined with the belief by some board members that it needed to be downtown, led to the lease of an expensive space across the street from the convention center and blocks away from where the new SFMOMA was to be built. Jim worked carefully on projecting budgets and concluded that it would be impossible to make a financial go of it in downtown San Francisco. Everything was just too pricey. Jim made his report to the board, but they felt this was their window of opportunity and needed to proceed. After much discussion with me, Jim resigned in 1988 in protest and assumed the voluntary position of vice chair of the board, wanting the Ansel Adams Center to succeed even while he thought it impossible. The Friends of Photography had grown into such a healthy nonprofit because of the sizable membership (more than sixteen thousand) that Jim and his staff of a dozen had built by providing excellent member services. People felt that they received a lot for their money. When he resigned as the director, he left in place an important publishing program of photography books, an exciting workshop program, a sizable endowment, and a grand collection of Ansel’s photographs.