Arthur Ollman

Arthur Ollman (born March 6, 1947) is an American photographer, author, curator, professor emeritus (San Diego State University (2006—2019), and founding director of The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. He served as MoPA director from 1983 to 2006, and as director of the School of Art, Design and Art History, SDSU, from 2006 to 2011. He was president of the board of directors for the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (2015—2019) and has authored and contributed to more than twenty-five books and catalogs.

Arthur Ollman was born in Milwaukee in 1947, the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine.

He studied art history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1965—1969).

After graduating with a BA, Ollman purchased fifty-three acres of forestland in Bucksport, Maine, and started a commune while pursuing an interest in photography.

He left Maine in 1974 to attend San Francisco Art Institute, and in 1975, the MFA program at Lone Mountain College (now part of University of San Francisco).

There he expanded on photographing at night with long exposures, switching from black and white to color.

In 1976, he created The Photo History Video Project, producing oral historical video interviews with older Western photographers who had not yet been well researched.

These included Laura Gilpin, Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch, Jack Welpott, Ruth Bernhard, Walter Chappell, and Edmund Teske.

The first museum to purchase Ollman’s images was The Museum of Modern Art, in 1977.

He went on to exhibit in one-person and group exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

His work is in many international museum collections.

Ollman was one of the founding members of the board of directors for San Francisco Camerawork and served as chairman of the board from 1979 to 1983.

There he curated exhibitions of many well-known figures in contemporary photography.

In 1979, Ollman was introduced to Ansel Adams, and the following year Adams asked Ollman to teach at his Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshop.

For the next three summers, Ollman taught alongside Adams and some of the most prominent photographers of the day, including Roy DeCarava, Olivia Parker, Marie Cosindas, David Kennerly, and Arnold Newman.

Ollman was hired in November 1982, and the museum opened in May 1983.

In 1983, Ansel Adams recommended Ollman for the position of founding director of The Museum of Photographic Arts slated for San Diego’s Balboa Park.

He served as director for twenty-three years, overseeing two capital expansion projects, development of a permanent collection numbering over 7,000 objects by 2006, and a research library of more than twenty-five thousand books and ephemera.

Ollman curated more than seventy-five exhibitions, many worldwide, including photographers of the time, such as Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Roy DeCarava, Arnold Newman, Harry Callahan, William Klein, Ruth Bernhard, Eikoh Hosoe, Graciela Iturbide, Flor Garduño, Robert Heinecken, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, James Nachtwey, Sebastiao Salgado, Susan Meiselas, Duane Michals, and Bill Brandt.

He also organized exhibitions of historical figures, William Henry Fox Talbot, Samuel Bourne, Carleton Watkins, F. Holland Day, Edweard Muybridge, Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, and Roman Vishniac.

Upon leaving the Museum of Photographic Arts in 2006, Ollman was hired as Director of the School of Art, Design, and Art History at San Diego State University, overseeing university policies, seven staff and 101 full and part-time faculty; 1,200 majors and nearly 10,000 students per year in art, design, and/or art history classes, and an MFA program with approximately 30 candidates per year.

Under his leadership and fundraising the university opened its San Diego State University Downtown Gallery.

In 2011, Ollman left that position and reverted to full-time teaching.

He taught both color and black and white studio classes, history of photography, and museum studies.

In 2014, Ollman joined the board of The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography “FEP” based in Lausanne, Switzerland; Paris, France; and Minneapolis, USA.

Ollman has taught photography for The Fred Roberts Photography Workshops (2015-2019), in Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, India, Portugal, Mozambique, Mexico, Canada, and the U.S.

Ollman has two children.

In 2016 he curated FEP’s retrospective exhibition of the Brazilian contemporary artist, Vik Muniz, which has been seen in six international venues.

In 2018, he co-curated Hard Truths with David Furst of The New York Times, an exhibition of five of the finest photojournalists working for the Times, which has traveled to five venues in Europe.

In 2019, Ollman retired and was awarded professor emeritus status.