Preserving history: Photographer donates collection to university

You’re an artist. What will become of your work? As you reach maturity, where will your work be housed so that it can be seen? What does “legacy” entail?

I asked these questions in helping the famous photographer Santi Visalli donate 106,964 photographic images to a public institution. Artists, when donating work, can only take specific material costs, not the market value of their art. Santi’s photos graced innumerable covers of Time and Newsweek, as well as The New York Times. He produced 14 huge, full-color cityscape books for Rizzoli. And you will not find a larger assemblage of celebrities than in his 2011 book, Icons.

A number like 106,964 is a lot of color photos, black and white prints, slides, negatives and digital material, not to mention files of publications. There’s 50 years of press cards, honorific awards (a 1996 Knight of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy and a 2011 Italian medal for Life Achievement awarded by the president) displayed in a huge Lucite box and framed in a wall-size collage. Santi mounted a command show of 33 large-format prints, which we toured.

The appraisal problem was to value works spanning a 50-year career of some of the most iconic images of the 20th century. With the IRS special artists’ limitations, we could only claim the cost of Kodachrome 64 film in the case of 80,666 color slides, and Kodak 400 speed film in the case of 21,413 negatives. We could claim darkroom charges, but we had to research that historic cost.

Thus, the choice of donating work by a living artist is often a difficult one, especially when faced with IRS limitations, knowing that just one of your prints has a market value in the thousands of dollars. Images as iconic as early Beatles portraiture, Andy Warhol behind the camera, the faces and moods of six different presidents, MLK’s first speeches — these cry out to be donated to the public. These images are part of our shared history, as well as the artist’s witness to our culture.

Santi decided to leave his legacy to an institution of higher learning, which is home to 255,000 books and 32,000 images, housed, appropriately, in the wing donated for Special Collections by Robert J. Lagomarsino.

For 50 years, Santi taught through his lens. His works now teach a bevy of students. In Italy, his credits are so numerous that he says Italians of the mid-century “have probably seen America though my eyes.” Not only is his legacy perfected in an educational setting, but the place is perfect. The Broome Library at the Cal State Channel Islands was designed by British architect Lord Norman Foster as a glass structure enclosing the existing architecture. CSCI began as Roosevelt’s New Deal Public Works project built to house the Camarillo State Mental Hospital from 1936-1997, on land once inhabited by the Chumash in the moonscape that is the Santa Monica Mountains, overshadowed by the craggy Round Mountain.

Santi’s legacy began in 1932 in Messina, Sicily. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1959; by the 1980s, he was one of the seven most important Sicilians in the arts in New York City. A gallery card at Cal State Channel Islands of the artist’s point of view quotes: “I’m a positivist. I look at things in a very positive way. Your work is an extension of your personality, of your culture. Even when I photograph trash cans, I try to bring some dignity to them.”

For Santi’s emeritus show, he devoted one wall to three of his best pictures. We see three icons: a young Robert De Niro gesturing in “Italian” with limpid eyes and soulful hands, Jacqueline Bisset sitting dwarfed by Santi’s overcoat in the prow of a ship filming The Deep, and an impish Francois Truffaut peering into a camera while shooting The Wild Child. Positivist?? Santi was sent on the fly to interview Mr. Truffaut. Santi asked the costumed diminutive man behind the camera to point Mr. Truffaut out to him. Laughingly, Mr. Truffaut (the costumed man) introduced himself to Santi! Santi said, “I wanted to dig a hole.”

Intrepid, probative and genuine, Santi’s CSCI donation has drawn full circle around the legacy of the career of this “can-do” artistic personality, which shines in his pictures.