Photograph from a Ghost Town. Silver Gelatin photograph measuring 5 x 7 in laid on 11 x 14 in cardstock with signature in pencil to lower right. Label on reverse with Gagliani’s San Francisco address. This photograph was featured in the flyer for Gagliani’s 1964 exhibition at the Underground Gallery in New York City. From the bio on Gitterman Gallery’s website. He explored the expressive potential of abstraction and his prints reveal poetic evidence of the spirit. Oliver Gagliani was born to an Italian America family in Placerville, California in 1917 and lived most of his life in San Francisco. His passion for music began in elementary school and he played the violin through college. In 1946, while intending to go to the San Francisco Symphony at the War Memorial Opera House, he mistakenly walked next door into the San Francisco Museum of Art (at the time housed in the War Memorial Veterans Building). There he saw the traveling retrospective of Paul Strand organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1945. Gagliani recalled that: It was beautiful, his counterpoint of light and shade, object and space, just as in the music I had studied for so long. It was this exhibition of Strand’s work and the 1946 retrospective of Edward Weston’s work at the museum which compelled Gagliani to explore photography as a means of self expression. That same year he took an intensive course with Ansel Adams and later in 1964 he took a workshop with Minor White. During many family vacations Gagliani traveled to California State Parks and ghost towns in Nevada to photograph. His first two solo exhibitions were at the George Eastman House in 1955 and at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1957 and he went on to exhibit extensively throughout his career. At the encouragement of Jack Welpott and Leland Rice, Gagliani went back to school and received an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1972, which enabled him to teach photography at universities and colleges. For decades he also taught many photography workshops. Books on Gagliani include: Oliver Gagliani (Ideograph, 1975); Oliver Gagliani: Past and Present: Photographs (Museo ItaloAmericano, 1987); and Oliver Gagliani: Scores of Abstraction (Center for Photographic Art, 2006).