This box presents a bit of a dilemma.
“Art” is clear, the “November 21, 1947” date is clear, but there’s also a name and address on the box that makes it all hard to reconcile
Oscar Galgiani, 165 E. Harding Way.
Oscar Vincent Galgiani is indeed a renowned Stocktonian artist, and he did live at this Stockton address in the 1940’s.
But why are there 20 images of staged ceramics in this box ? This is a major project to engage in, and Oscar is known for hundreds of California oil landscapes and some 66 oil portraits. There are no references to Oscar Galgiani and ceramic art.
Below are all the images Joel kept in this box. For me it is not clear if this relates to SJC or COP schoolwork or if this is indeed ceramic work Oscar made and very few are aware of this endeavor.
The arrangements below in these images is from basic to very skill full and I believe an experienced artist was at work to set the stage so to say.
Not all negatives are perfect when it comes to lighting, but there’s evolution along the way.
All six above images were printed or copied at some point in time, witness the black hold-down tape.
Next image were most likely not printed. It’s not hard to see why the image below didn’t cut mustard. The “backdrop” is distracting and there’s no cropping that can fix this.
The image above is an accidental double exposure where the camera remained on the tripod but an element (stick) was added or removed. The overall image was overexposed.
A lot of work and time went into setting this up. Quite a few images are promising from a commercial perspective.
Lighting these displays is challenging as one can notice after the fact. Hard shadows are not supportive of clean lines.
A number of color images of these ceramics were also made on Kodachrome, we’ll be looking how these came out in the near future.
Cheers !
Finding Joel Pahl Dardis 