VAN DEREN COKE, Freidman Designer, 1956, 7.5x9" Gelatin silver print, Printed c. 1956, Initialed and dated in pencil on mount recto below right of print: VC 56.

Van Deren Coke was a critic, historian, curator, and photographer. His knowledge of making negatives and printing various processes informed his connoisseurship. Andrew Smith first met Coke in the mid-1970s. One of Coke's favorite sayings was that a good photograph had to have mystery in it to make you want to look for more.

Frank Van Deren Coke (1921-2004) was born in Lexington, Kentucky. As a young man, he was drawn to photography, and for a time worked as an assistant to Ansel Adams in Carmel, California. He graduated from the University of Kentucky with a degree in history and art history. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Indiana University and did additional graduate work at Harvard. Ultimately, Coke settled on a career in academia, teaching at the University of Florida and then at Arizona State, before becoming chairman of the art department and founding director of the art museum at the University of New Mexico. He left the Southwest in 1970 to work at the George Eastman House, where he broadened the museum’s focus beyond mere photography to be more inclusive of film and technology. But he was there for only a couple of years before returning to New Mexico. In 1979, he was hired as curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he oversaw the establishment of a department of photography. He embarked on an aggressive acquisition program, expanding the focus of the museum’s holdings to include highly experimental, design-related images produced in Germany, France, and Czechoslovakia. 

In his own photographic work, Coke used numerous devices in printing, including solarization and montage. For several years, he also used a darkroom technique in which he flashed a white light as the print was developing. This tended to blur the literalism of the image while retaining its link to reality. According to curator Robert Sobieszek, "Van was an iconoclast. He understood the canon of straight photography, but he also really appreciated the experimental approach. The overriding contribution he made -- and it was stupendous -- is that he kept alive an interest in experimental photography, alternative photography, photography as printmaking, photography as an expansive rather than an exclusive medium."

Very good. Major skinning on mount verso, accretions on mount recto; does not affect print.