John Galgano Pete Eckert Collaboration

John and I met in art school. He was 17 and had a full tuition scholarship. I was 20 and was working along on money I had saved. John was a photographer and I was a sculptor. In his first year of school he got his girlfriend pregnant. I remember sleeping in the bathtub while they were necking in the living room. He got married to the girl and we lost touch after he left school. We reconnected many years later. He had an interesting life, he left school and became a stock car racer. He later worked for Ford building motors for Nascar. John was very generous; he brought me to Yosemite so we could do a photoshoot. Things were pretty crazy in the dormitory when John and I were there in 1976. There were many activities that I consider somewhat like the film Animal House.

These are three images I did with John. I was struggling to overlay stained glass in the redwood forest scenes. I was having trouble with the project. John worked with them, cropping them down.

I normally don’t do any collaborations. I also normally don’t crop at all. I don’t do collaborations because I want it to be clear that I do all the framing and composition in the event of taking the photo. I call this the event stage of the work. In the product stage I show the contact sheet to sighted friends and they give me feedback. I compare my memory of the event to the descriptions told to me. I chose which images I am going to print. I name the piece at that time to help keep a memory of it.

We did this collaboration when John was dying from cancer. John died on July 30, 2022.