Frank Vanek

Frank Vanek is known to us through one photograph and the card he filled in to show it. The photograph is a night exposure: a lit sign reading Richardson's Ice Cream Parlor floats in a black field, and a long white trail of moving light sweeps in from the lower left, swings around the sign and doubles back, so that the sign sits inside a ring like Saturn. On the back, on a printed exhibition entry label, he wrote in firm capitals the artist's name, FRANK VANEK; the title, RICHARDSON'S ICE CREAM IS OUT OF THIS WORLD; the medium, PHOTOGRAPHY, ABSTRACT; and the price he asked, one hundred and fifty dollars. He signed the mat in graphite at lower right. That card is the beginning of his record, and we have set out here everything else we have found.

A Photograph Made in the Camera

Everything in the picture happened in one exposure. The shutter stayed open while a light, a car's lamps or a light carried by hand, travelled through the frame, writing its path as a continuous line. The fixed lights of the scene burned in as small hard stars, their eight points made by the blades of a stopped down lens. Two loose clusters of dots in the lower half are lit trees. Nothing was added in the darkroom. Vanek's choice of words on the card is exact: the subject is recognisable, but the picture is about the drawing light makes when it is given time, and he called it abstract.

The title is the other half of the work. Without it the photograph is a handsome white gesture in a black field. With it the ring becomes a planet's, the ice cream parlour becomes a world of its own, and the viewer is let in on the joke. It is the kind of picture that wins people over at a club show or a juried exhibition, and the entry card tells us that is where it hung.

The Exhibition Card

The label at the head of the card carries a monogram of interlaced letters closing in a paintbrush, the kind of device regional arts associations and art leagues printed on their entry forms. Its lettering is not spelled out, and we do not name the organisation on the strength of a logo alone. The professional framing, a cream over black core double mat with ruled gilt fillets in a stained and gilt edged moulding, is the standard exhibition framing of the later twentieth century, and it is likely the photograph was framed for that show.

Death Valley at Lake Tahoe

The one other public trace we have found places a photographer of the name in our own region. In October 2001 the Reno Gazette-Journal's gallery listings reported that the exhibits on display at Lake Tahoe Community College in South Lake Tahoe through 1 November included photographs of Death Valley by Frank Vanek, shown alongside Tony Harper's photographs of the Lake Tahoe area and the work of Sonoma Lee Kellogg. Long exposures, night skies and desert light are natural companions, and a photographer who shows Death Valley in a college gallery is exactly the kind of serious amateur or working artist who enters a juried show with a card like ours. We present the identification as probable.

Richardson's

The sign itself is a clue still to be followed. The best known Richardson's Ice Cream is the dairy and parlour on South Main Street in Middleton, Massachusetts, which has sold ice cream since 1952. Other Richardson's parlours have existed across the country, and we have not yet matched the sign in the photograph to a place.

Why Vanek Matters

Thousands of good photographs were made by people who never had a monograph or a dealer, and almost all of them have lost their names. This one kept its maker's signature, his own title and his price, and so it can be read the way he meant it. Our task is to keep that card attached to the picture and to go on looking for the rest of his work.