Oliver Galiani, 1917-2002

Afterimage, March-April, 2003 by Darwin Marable

Oliver Galiani died on November 20, 2002, in Burligame, California at the age of 85.

A master craftsman and a photographer's photographer, Gagliani had been photographing for over 50 years and had a strong attraction to the ghost towns of Virginia City and Bodie, Nevada. He magically transformed deteriorating windows, doors, walls and buildings into images resonating with mystery and light.

Born in Placerville, California, where his maternal grandparents were forty-niners, Gagliani grew up in the Italian community of San Francisco. He studied the violin as a child and attended San Francisco State College where he had planned to become a composer. World War II interrupted his education. In 1945 he saw the Paul Strand Retrospective, 1916-1945 at the San Francisco Museum of Art, an experience that convinced him that photography could also be an art form.

Although mainly self-taught, Gagliani studled briefly with Ansel Adams and Minor White at the California School of Fine Arts and then with Ruth Bernhard. While working as a draftsman for the U.S. Navy, he attended graduate school and was one of the first M.F.A. degree graduates in photography at the California State College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

In 1954 he was one of the co-founders of the Photographer's Gallery in San Francisco. In 1965 he began teaching and conducting workshops and happened to work with Paul Caponigro, Cole Weston and Van Deren Coke. In the late 1960s he was also one of the founding members of San Francisco's Visual Dialogue Foundation. He kept on visiting and photographing Italy over a period of twenty two years, going from double-exposing, there, film previously exposed in California to taking surprising and memorable portraits of local villagers.

Unassuming and quiet, Gagliani was always generous with his knowledge about photography and he loved teaching. With an impish grin and a twinkle in his eye, he seemed like an ageless sage. John Spence Weir, a colleague, says, "He was an icon of personal devotion to the medium, a master technician, a visionary and a light catcher."

A memorial will be held on Sunday, May 18, 2003, from 2 to p.m. at the California College of Arts and Crafts, IIII 8th Street, San Francisco.

[Edited from a text submitted by Darwin Marable, photo historian, writer, lecturer and curator based in the San Francisco Bay Area.]