Words in pictures: Warden artist tells stories from old 35mm film

WARDEN — Vinnie O Bannon has been a photographer for most of his adult life, and has the 35mm film negatives to prove it.

And he loves to tell stories, especially stories with a twist or a clever play on words. Most of them are even true, he said.

The Warden-based artist has combined the two with his woodworking and woodburning skills to turn his old pictures into something unique, which will be on display at the Basalt Collective Fine Art Gallery, 114 E. Third Ave. in Moses Lake starting Feb. 4.

O Bannon builds his own frames. He insets objects into each frame, but it all began with the negatives.

“The negatives were in an apple box. I always kept them, always wrote what was on them. But what are you going to do with 35mm negatives?” he said.

He didn’t really have an answer until 2014, when he got a scanner that allowed him to preserve the old negatives.

“I started scanning and thought some of these were good enough to frame,” he said. “Personal favorites that I hadn’t seen for 40 years.”

He wanted to record the subjects, so he started writing information on the back.

“And it just progressed from there to here,” he said.

Well, he didn’t want to just write down the subjects in the picture. Many of them suggested a story.

“You go up to a picture, and you say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. Who is it?’ And I answer,” he said.

His photograph of wild horses inspired a story about an angry hotel guest, long ago.

“The story on the back is ‘Wild Horses Couldn’t Make Me.’ And this is rather true. A guy walked into the Holiday Inn, as I recollect it was. He got upset, and he cut the front desk in half with a chainsaw,” O Bannon said.

He ended the story with the hotel guest walking out, getting on his horse and riding off through town.

But he wanted to keep the story with the picture. And that was where his woodworking and woodburning skills came in.

He uses anything from beads to metal to braided horsehair, in the case of the angry chainsaw-wielding hotel guest.

“The frames are all 100 years old. The wood is,” he said.

Some are inset with rusted barbed wire.

“That’s definitely 100 years old,” he said.

The story is burned with a woodworking tool onto pieces of thin wood, which are then added to the back of the frame. Some stories are short, others are long, and require multiple pieces of wood. Long stories are hinged together.

“I want you to interact with it. That’s the whole point,” he said.

O Bannon affixes the pictures to carousels he builds, attaching the photograph with a hinge. The viewer opens the photo, like opening a door, and finds the story tucked away inside.

Tucked away in the stories are visual surprises. A picture of his wife Terri with a deer trophy turned into the tale of an Irish lass and her skills butchering the carcass, a story that ran to two or three boards. O Bannon used an enameled metal shamrock to keep the boards in place.

It took him a while to find the right tools, he said. He used a soldering iron on his first story boards before discovering the more nimble woodburning tools. That allowed him to develop fonts for his stories, and even add illustrations.

A few photos are purchased, including a vintage picture of moose bones and a human skull.

“I remembered it from 25 years ago and went on the hunt for it,” he said.

It illustrates a story about an eventful hunting trip with his brother, where they encountered a man who bore a striking resemblance to a character from the Popeye cartoons. O Bannon added a drawing of the Popeye character to his story board.

A picture of Old Faithful led to a story about his wife’s mishap with a bottle of mustard that splattered mustard all over the inside of the family Volkswagen bus.

“This is the kind of thing that really works pretty well. I guess you could say some fond memories,” he said.

“The Machinist” is a family tale, a picture of his maternal grandfather, highly skilled in the machinist’s trade. His instructor inspected a sample his grandfather had made, then picked up a mallet and smashed it to pieces. That way it wasn’t perfect, O Bannon said.

There’s a picture of a half-buried hand grenade from a long-ago military exercise and the events that occurred when O Bannon turned it into authorities.

“This is what happens whenever I walk into a police station with a hand grenade,” he said. “Oftentimes, (the story) starts with a little history, and then I move into the punch lines. I’ve got you going just about to the point where you say, ‘Oh, this is going to be boring.’ And then – wham. I get you.”

The pictures and the stories will be part of his legacy.

“This is what I’ll leave behind when I’m out of the picture,” he said.