lundi 6 septembre 2010
mercredi 18 août 2010
Tale of Ansel Adams Negatives Grows Hazy
By REYHAN HARMANCI
Published: August 13, 2010
Courtesy of Marian Walton
This print of the Jeffrey pine in Yosemite by an unknown photographer, Earl Brooks, resembles an image that has been attributed to Ansel Adams.
Eric Paul Zamora/Fresno Bee/MCT, via Getty Images
Rick Norsigian with one of the 65 glass negatives he bought in a California garage sale. Prints from them are being sold as the work of Ansel Adams.
But a fairy-tale ending is eluding Mr. Norsigian. A day after the announcement, Matthew Adams, a grandson of the photographer, disputed the finding, questioned the credentials of the experts and went so far as to call the whole business a “scam.”
A few days after that, an Oakland woman, Marian Walton, announced that she had a photo that was identical to one of the negatives. It had been taken, she said, not by Adams, the famous outdoors photographer, but by an uncle of hers, Earl Brooks.
And now, in the latest complication, court records reveal that Mr. Streets, who set the value for the negatives and is handling the related sales, is a convicted felon with a criminal record for petty theft and fraud in Louisiana and Kentucky. Though he says on his Web site, davidstreetsbeverlyhills.com, that he has 25 years of fine-art appraisal experience, two of Mr. Streets’s former employers say his true talent is in the embellishment of his credentials.
Doris Allen, who owns the Bryant Galleries in New Orleans, says that though Mr. Streets, 45, can be “very charming,” he had said he had no appraisal experience when she hired him at her business in 2000. Now she is amazed to see him occupy an influential role in a national art debate. “How can he get up there and claim that those negatives are worth $200 million?” she said. “That is absurd.”
The discussion of just who took the pictures is far from over, and Mr. Norsigian’s lawyer, Arnold Peter, said Mr. Streets’s past has little bearing on that question. But in a subjective field where credibility and expertise matter, it cannot help Mr. Norsigian that Mr. Streets’s résumé appears to be tarnished.
For his part, Mr. Streets initially denied in an interview that he was the same David W. Streets who was convicted of passing bad checks, fraud and petty theft over a seven-year period that ended in 1998 when he was in his early 30s. But he later sent an e-mail in which he cited his extensive civic involvement in recent years, described the incidents as old, and attributed them to “untreated manic-depression” that he began to experience after his mother “committed suicide when I was 15, and my father died the following year.”
“I took complete responsibility and learned from that experience,” he said.
The art debate has its roots in Mr. Norsigian’s purchase of the box of negatives, a rummage-sale find that took on a new light when he later noticed in an Adams biography that certain features of the plate-glass negatives he bought, which depict California landscape scenes from Carmel, Yosemite and around San Francisco, seemed to match events in in Adams’s life. In particular, the plates showed evidence of fire damage, and in 1937 Adams lost negatives to a darkroom fire.
“The size, the fire damage, the locations and different stuff like that,” Mr. Norsigian said. “I kept researching little pieces at a time.”
He took his discovery to members of the Adams family, who disputed his claims. Adams had been notoriously protective of his negatives, locking them in a bank vault when he lived in San Francisco. Would he misplace a box of negatives?
“Ansel would never have done something like that,” said William Turnage, managing trustee of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, which owns the rights to Adams’s name and work.
But in 2007 Mr. Norsigian and Mr. Peter, his lawyer, set about organizing an authentication team that included a former F.B.I. agent, a former United States attorney, two handwriting experts, a meteorologist (to track cloud patterns in the images), a landscape photographer and a former curator of European decorative arts and sculpture for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
They concluded, without question, that the prints were of the sort made by Adams as a young photographer in the 1920s.
Mr. Peter said he decided to market the materials through Mr. Streets, whom he did not know but whose work as a dealer he was aware of. Mr. Streets, who moved to California from New Orleans in 2005, bills himself as “Los Angeles’s leading appraiser of all genres of fine art and celebrity memorabilia.”
Among clients listed on his Web site are three former presidents, including Bill Clinton, and numerous celebrities. It features photos of him with Hollywood stars and with Maria Shriver, the wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. A spokesman for Mr. Clinton said he did not recognize the dealer’s name.
Mr. Peter said it was Mr. Streets who came up with the $200 million figure the night before their July 27 news conference. “The $200 million represents several sources of revenue over an extended period of time — reprints, licensing, eventual sale of the negatives,” Mr. Peter said.
David Livingston/Getty Images
David W. Streets, who appraised the images.
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
The David W. Streets gallery in Beverly Hills, Calif., is handling the sale of images from Mr. Norsigian’s trove that it attributes to Adams.
It certainly will be difficult to support that value if the photos were taken by Mr. Brooks, Ms. Walton’s uncle, now deceased, who dabbled in photography. Ms. Walton, 87, said, “I about fell off my sofa” when she saw Mr. Norsigian’s announcement on television. The image on the screen looked exactly like a photo by her uncle that she had hung on her bathroom wall: a picture of the leaning Jeffrey pine in Yosemite that she had inherited from her father in 1981.
Two former Adams assistants, John Sexton and Alan Ross, have since agreed with her, saying tell-tale shadows and dust spots indicated that the two Yosemite pictures, Mr. Norsigian’s and Ms. Walton’s, were taken at the same time with the same camera.
Nothing about that development has dissuaded the Norsigian team from moving forward with sales, staged out of Mr. Streets’s gallery.
Mr. Streets has become something of a fixture in some Beverly Hills circles. Last May the mayor there, Jimmy Delshad, read a proclamation at a party Mr. Streets held on the anniversary of his gallery’s opening. But the mayor’s office later said he did not declare it “David W. Streets Day,” as it says on Mr. Streets’s Web site.
Mr. Streets held a similarly high profile in New Orleans, even after his criminal convictions, for which he received probation and was, in one case, required to pay $19,000 restitution. As director of the Bryant Galleries branch there, he was a guest speaker at an art luncheon and regularly appeared in the society column.
Ms. Allen of Bryant Galleries said she did not know when she hired him that he had a criminal record, including a charge for pocketing a $600 deposit that a woman had made toward a couch at a furniture store where he had worked.
Ms. Allen, though, said she and her husband had a dispute with Mr. Streets and demoted him in 2004, after which he left and ended up working at at least one other gallery in New Orleans. She characterized his director’s position as primarily a sales job.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mr. Streets moved to Los Angeles, where he has made his share of celebrity friends.
“I’ve known him for years,” said Bryan Batt, an actor who plays Salvatore on “Mad Men.” He described him as “a kind and generous man” who gave a party for Mr. Batt when his memoir was released last spring.
The continuing dispute has not shut down the sale of prints, which Mr. Norsigian has priced from $1,500 to $7,500; posters are going for $45. Mr. Peter declined to say how many have been sold or what percentage Mr. Streets is receiving as the dealer.
Copyright claims may well be brought by the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.
A solid outcome from the haze of the dispute has been the discovery of a new photographic star. This November a San Francisco gallery owner, Scott Nichols, will be hosting a show of work by Adams and his assistants and he has decided to include photos by Mr. Brooks too.
“Uncle Earl is a damned good photographer,” Mr. Nichols said, “There’s no doubt about it.”
vendredi 13 août 2010
lundi 2 août 2010
jeudi 13 mai 2010
lundi 10 mai 2010
Into the night
Antoine d'Agata me encanta por la crudeza de su fotografía, no puedo evitar pensar en las pinturas de Francis Bacon. Forma parte del colectivo Magnum a pesar de que su estilo se aleje completamente de la fotografía documental clásica a lo Cartier-Bresson.
La semana pasada estuvo en EFTI impartiendo un taller a los del documental, me hubiese encantado tenerlo como profesor.
Por cierto, el artista expone por primera vez en madrid.
http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.StaticPage_VPage&SP=photographers_list&l1=0&XXAPXX=SubPanel10
dimanche 9 mai 2010
mardi 4 mai 2010
lundi 3 mai 2010
Marina Abramovic
The performance artist Marina Abramovic titled her Museum of Modern Art show The Artist Is Present. Why? Because the artist is present. Among the many Abramovic pieces re-created for the exhibition, the one drawing most attention is a simple desk at which the artist has agreed to sit silently for the entire duration of the show, and invites spectators to take a seat for as long as they like (or can stand). The sharp-eyed ladies at Jezebel noticed that Abramovic’s table has hosted some famous visitors over the course of the show, which runs through May 31. (Each sitter is photographed for the museum’s Flickr page.) Sharon Stone, Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed, Christiane Amanpour, Isabelle Huppert, and André Balazs all came to sit for a spell. We’d try to reach Abramovic for comment, but we’ve got a feeling her lips are sealed.
dimanche 2 mai 2010
Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=27083&searchid=9595
samedi 1 mai 2010
Why not
Cindy Sherman’s new photographs are to be installed as wallpaper at Metro Pictures rather than framed images. The backgrounds were shot by Cindy in Central Park and then digitally assembled in black and white grainy foliage repetitions.
mardi 27 avril 2010
samedi 24 avril 2010
Land Art
Ahora fuimos a majadahonda con Amaya, pero la actividad de hacer origamis para luego colgarlos en un arbol no nos apasionó mucho. Emilia y yo decidimos hacer una obra efimera con la naturaleza jajaja. Bueno esto es lo que quedó.
Lastima que las fotos son medio chafas.
Cuídense
Rodrigo
ps- Lo mejor de todo, fue enlodarse completamente.
mercredi 21 avril 2010
A subir videos ya!
Hola tod@s,
Tengo que decir - disfruto mas y mas el tiempo de las clases con vosotros.
Espero que lo podemos elevar hacia . . .
Crear el criterio, crear posibilidades.
Que tengais un buen Miercoles!
Muah
Emi
vendredi 9 avril 2010
Anyone?
Sotiri Prize 2010 FACING FEAR
•Application Deadline
15.04.2010
Visual artists under the age of 35 working with lens-based media are invited to apply for Sotiri Prize 2010 until 15th April 2010. The works of shortlisted artist, chosen by the curator of this year?s edition Paula Muhr, based on their quality and relevance to the topic of the competition, will be shown in the group exhibitions in Gallery of Arts in Korca and National Gallery of Arts in Tirana, Albania. A jury of experts will choose the winner.
FACING FEAR
Negotiating
Relationships between Subjective Feelings and Social Norms
Curator: Paula Muhr
Keywords: alarm, anxiety, apprehension, conditioning, dread, fear, horror, nightmare, panic attack, phobia, stress-related disorders, trepidation, worry
http://www.projekt56.com/
jeudi 8 avril 2010
mercredi 17 mars 2010
mardi 9 mars 2010
James Jean. Ilustración.
James Jean is a Taiwanese-American award winning artist and illustrator living in Los Angeles.
He was born in Taiwan but was raised in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey.[2] He was educated at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Upon graduating in 2001, he quickly became an acclaimed cover artist for DC Comics, garnering seven Eisner awards, three consecutive Harvey awards, two gold medals and a silver from the Society of Illustrators of LA, and a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators of NY. He has also contributed to many national and international publications. His clients include Time Magazine, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, ESPN, Atlantic Records, Target, Playboy, Knopf, Prada among others. He has also illustrated covers for the comic book series Fables and The Umbrella Academy, for which he has won six Eisner Awards for "Best Cover Artist".
vendredi 5 mars 2010
La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962, VOSE)
La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) es una película francesa de ciencia ficción de 28 minutos filmada en blanco y negro. En ella, se relata la historia de un experimento de viaje en el tiempo llevado a cabo tras una guerra atómica. Si bien es una película, el director la define como una fotonovela, pues se realizó filmando una serie de fotografías que dan contexto a la narración que las acompaña y apenas cuenta con una breve secuencia de imágenes en movimiento. 12 monos (1995), de Terry Gilliam, se inspiró en La Jetée. David Bowie también se inspiró en esta película para el videoclip de la canción Jump, They Say (1993), dirigido por Mark Romanek. (Wikipedia)
Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983, VOSE)
Sans Soleil is a meditation on the nature of human memory and the inability to recall the context and nuances of memory and as a result, how the perception of personal and global histories are affected. Stretching the genre of documentary, this experimental essay-film is a rich composition of thoughts, images and scenes, mainly from Japan and Guinea-Bissau, "two extreme poles of survival". Some other scenes were filmed in Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco. A female narrator reads from letters supposedly sent to her by the (fictitious) cameraman Sandor Krasna. Sans Soleil is often labelled as a documentary or travelogue, however it contains fictional elements and moves from one location to another without regard to a location or character-based narrative. (Wikipedia)
vendredi 12 février 2010
Tim Davis
http://www.davistim.com/
Me gustan mucho los colores y lo divertido de ciertas de sus fotos. Me recuerda un poco a Alec Soth, de la agencia Magnum.
http://www.alecsoth.com/
dimanche 7 février 2010
Nicholas Alan Cope
vendredi 5 février 2010
Sixteen Google Street Views (Jon Rafman)
"The images in Sixteen Google Street Views depict solitary individuals in a variety of contemporary landscapes," Rafman says in his book. "Street View photography presents a very different perspective on the relation of the individual to his world than the art of previous historical periods. The romantics portrayed solitary figures in an encounter with the sublime in which man felt both insignificant within nature but also transcendent over it. The romantic encounter with the sublime, moreover, pointed towards the individual's inner powers and towards his freedom." (wired.co.uk - wired places)
jeudi 4 février 2010
Julius Schulman, Fotógrafo de arquitectura.
Esta foto me parece una de las fotos mas lindas que he visto en arquitectura.
Stahl Residence. Los Angeles. Sometime around the 60's?
mardi 2 février 2010
dimanche 31 janvier 2010
Chad States
http://chadstates.com/
hay una serie sobre el cruising y otra sobre la masculinidad, es bastante interesante.
hay una serie sobre el cruising y otra sobre la masculinidad, es bastante interesante.
mercredi 27 janvier 2010
Collage?
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