Oliver Gagliani papers

Oliver Lewis Gagliani (1917-2002) was a San Francisco area fine art photographer and teacher, known for his technical mastery of large format black and white, although he worked in color later in life. His work consists of landscapes, portraits and abstracted close-up details that convey mood and feeling. Paul Strand, Ansel Adams and Minor White influenced his work.

Born in Placerville, California, February 11, 1917, his family moved to South San Francisco in 1919, where he attended school 1928–1937. He studied music in college during the 1940s in San Francisco. As a young man he studied violin for almost ten years, intending to become a professional musician. While serving in the U.S. Army from 1942-1945 he made his first photograph. A hearing loss sustained during the war prevented him from continuing a music career. After his discharge and return to San Francisco in 1946, he viewed a Paul Strand show and was inspired to turn his artistic talent to photography.

In 1948 he married Laura Frugoli and began working as an independent photographer. In 1949 he became ill with tuberculosis and spent periods of time in a sanitarium until 1958. During the early 1950s he attended engineering college in San Francisco and worked as a draftsman, while continuing to photograph. He co-founded the cooperative Bay Street Photographers Gallery in San Francisco, in 1954. In 1955 he was the first photographer to produce color prints from Kodak’s then proprietary Type C Process, for which he had to design his own enlarger head. In the early 1960s he began teaching at various workshops and colleges. In the late 1960s, he and a group of San Francisco Bay Area artists founded the Visual Dialogue Foundation, a group which was an important influence on the direction of fine art photography on the West Coast. In 1971 he earned an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts. He was awarded an NEA grant in 1976 and a Fisher Grant from the University of Arizona. From 1978 through the mid-1990s, he took three month work and travel trips to Italy and Sardinia. He was a popular teacher who conducted annual Oliver Gagliani Zone System and Fine Print Photography Workshops in Virginia City, Nevada from 1973 to 1995, teaching his interpretation of Ansel Adams’ Zone System. In 1981 he married Gayle Anderson. During the 1980s he began experimenting with whole roll, double exposed images which he titled “strip images.”

Gagliani had numerous one-person and group shows in the United States and Italy. His work is in the permanent collections of major museums in the United States. He died November 20, 2002, at age 85 in Burlingame, California.