About

Arthur Ollman has been a photographer for 55 years. He has had more than 25 one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries world­wide. His work is held in many museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, Cambridge, Mass. Between 1977 and 1983 he was Chairman of the Board of San Francisco Camerawork. In 1983, Ollman became the founding Director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, in San Diego, serving there for 23 years, and curating more than 100 exhibitions. He built a museum collection of more than 6,000 objects and a library of 25,000 books. He coordinated two capital expansion campaigns. He has written all or parts of 25 books and museum catalogs, and numerous articles for journals and periodicals.

From 2006­‐2011 he directed The School of Art and Design at San Diego State University. In 2020 he was named Professor Emeritus at that institution. Ollman was Chairman of the Board of The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography based in Lausanne, Paris and Minneapolis from 2013-2019.

Ollman continues to photograph, curate exhibitions, and write. His recent traveling exhibitions include Vik Muniz, with the accompanying book published by DelMonico Prestel, and Hard Truths: Five Photojournalists from the New York Times. Ollman lectures and teaches workshops, including The Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshop in 1980-1983, and more recently in Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Portugal, India, Mozambique and Los Angeles.