Ansel Adams or Uncle Earl? Why Should we care who made the Photographs?

Well, silly, . . . because photographs are property and all sorts of people have large financial stakes in controlling the number of Adams snaps in circulation. The law suit reported in this story shows the pretentious art world in all its essential venality. You can find background on the fracas here. In any case, much of my effort on this blog is aimed at shifting attention from worrying about photographs and their characteristics to talking about photography and how it is used. Perhaps the basic difficulty in effecting that shift is that photographs are simply worth so damned much?