Van Deren Coke; Independent obit (photographer)

[Hyfler/Rosner]

Experimental photographer and teacher and collector of
photography as art
30 July 2004

In 1999, the photographer and curator Van Deren Coke showed
a self-portrait at Andrew Smith Gallery in Santa Fe. This
colour photograph, of the artist in his late seventies, is a
powerful and melancholy study of ageing, as uncompromising
as the man himself.

Frank Van Deren Coke's fascination with photography was
lifelong. He made his first images as a teenager, in
Lexington, Kentucky, where his parents owned a hardware
company. Unlike many photographers of his generation, he
studied art history, gaining an MFA at Indiana University.
His interest in the wider history of art would profoundly
influence his later work - unlike many of his
contemporaries, he looked far beyond the documentary realism
which dominated US photographic thinking in the Sixties and
Seventies.

Coke was intrigued by photographers who practised as
artists, using all the techniques which science could
provide. In his own work he experimented with solarisation
and chemical staining techniques, making photographs which
explored the wide possibilities of photographic method.
Though he admired the documentary stance of Ansel Adams
(even working as Adams's assistant in the late Thirties) and
the light-filled simplicity of Edward Weston, his own
practice encompassed Xerox, montage and screen-printing.

But it was as a curator and teacher, rather than as a
photographer, that Van Deren Coke would be celebrated,
laying the foundations for the great photography collection
at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco (where he
became Curator in 1979) and becoming a powerful member of
the photography faculty at the University of New Mexico,
where he was founding director of the University Art Museum.
So eager was Coke to see photography flourish at the museum,
he donated to its collection over a thousand photographs
from photography's early history as well as important images
by photographers such as Walker Evans and Henri
Cartier-Bresson.

Coke entered the US curatorial and academic arenas at one of
the most exciting times in photography's institutional
history. In the Sixties and Seventies, the photographic art
world was small and intimate. Photographs now worth many
thousands of dollars could be bought, direct from the
photographer, for very little. Coke travelled to Europe to
buy pictures, combing the archives of photographers to find
the experimental work which he so admired and bringing
countless treasures back to the United States.

Astute at predicting which work would retain its place among
the icons of photography, he bought photographs by Brassai,
Bill Brandt and August Sander, as well as the photographic
experiments of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy.

Coke's curatorship at San Francisco and his academic work at
New Mexico put the West on the photographic map. For so long
dominated by East Coast institutions, primarily the Museum
of Modern Art in New York, Moma San Francisco became, and
remains, a key player in the making of photographic taste,
and photography at the University of New Mexico is
distinguished by its free-thinking radicalism. Coke's
acquisition policy at New Mexico and SF Moma influenced
generations of West Coast collectors, photographers and
academics, who rejected the orthodoxy of documentary realism
and continued to expand photography's technical and
aesthetic boundaries.

For many British photographers and museum curators in the
early Seventies, when photography was still an unwelcome
intruder in the art establishment, Van Deren Coke was an
inspiration, even a guru. The University of New Mexico at
Albuquerque became a recognised stopping-off point for
European curators, writers and image-makers eager to witness
the teaching of photography as art rather than craft.

Although Van Deren Coke was never to achieve fame as a maker
of photographic images, his legacy, preserved in the
archival boxes of SF Moma and in the work of the students he
taught and mentored throughout their careers, will be as
long-lasting as the images which he so assiduously collected
and preserved. Photographs, he asserted, were not for quick
consumption, but were objects worthy of intense reflection
and study. "Stop," he insisted, "and see what you're looking
at."

Val Williams

Frank Van Deren Coke, art historian, photographer and
curator: born Lexington, Kentucky 4 July 1921; Professor of
Art and Director, University Art Museum, University of New
Mexico 1962-70; Director, International Museum of
Photography, George Eastman House 1970-79; Curator of
Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 1979-87;
married first Eleanor Barton (one son, one daughter;
marriage dissolved), second 1983 Joan Gillberry; died
Albuquerque, New Mexico 11 July 2004.