Think about this for a second,” venerable photographer Santi Visalli told me. “You see an image, and your eye will tell your brain to tell your finger to click. And it is maybe a millionth of a second that passes, but there is a lapse of time. You have to be so sharp, so ahead of it, to determine what is going to happen in a millionth of a second from now.”
We were seated at the kitchen table of his elegant Santa Barbara home, where he’s lived for the past 11 years.
“Things don’t happen by accident,” he concluded.
A layer of mist obscured our view of the Channel Islands—a white view from a pristinely white home.
A photography career spanning four decades has given Visalli ample opportunity to sharpen his sense of time. His decades-long relationship with the likes of Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times led him to capture images of America in a more innocent time. Before heightened security measures could prevent him, Visalli was scaling the Golden Gate Bridge (a 740-foot feat) or dangling his camera through the roof of the New York Stock Exchange to get the most breathtaking shot. Before trashy gossip magazines stalked celebrities, angling for a dash of cellulite, Visalli was creating portraits of personalities in the best light possible, his work informed more by Renaissance painters than by his fellow news photographers.
“The most asked question is, ‘How did you get to all those people?’” Visalli said, referring to his images of De Niro, Dali, Warhol, Kennedy (John F. and Jackie O.), Fellini, and many more on display this month at Cal Poly’s University Art Gallery. “Well, my ego wants to say, ‘Because I’m the best.’ The real reason is that the people were accessible in those days.”
The photographer immigrated to New York from Sicily in the early ’60s with nothing but his modest Leica and boundless sense of wonder. He was forced to sell the Leica for $60, he explained, because he had to eat, but the sense of wonder he kept, all through his days at New York University, where he began studying economics and learning English, his fourth language. There, Visalli met his wife, Gayla, who gave him an old Swiss camera.
Visalli’s hobby of taking pictures in his spare time quickly blossomed into a passion. He showed the results to an Italian news agency that didn’t have anyone working in New York, and was offered some modest payment for his photographs.
He began working as a photojournalist, capturing images to illustrate news stories. Soon he would begin to capture an event or subject as he pleased. His images often transcended the assignment he was given, telling stories of their own. His big break came when he received an invitation to Truman Capote’s renowned Black and White Ball in 1967, where he was the only photographer.
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“I took the photographs to Newsweek and offered them exclusively,” Visalli told The Santa Barbara Independent decades later. “I told them they could have the story for free as long as someone would look at my portfolio.”
He got his break, and suddenly Visalli was one of New York’s premier freelance photographers. His close ties to the city’s Italian community meant a slew of assignments with Italian actors and film directors. But Visalli didn’t want his career dictated by his heritage alone, and he began turning down “Italian” assignments every so often to avoid being pigeonholed.
Bigger things would come. Like the time he was invited to photograph the appearance of Jackie Kennedy Onassis at the Metropolitan Opera House.
As his portfolio expanded, Visalli moved from photojournalism to celebrity portraiture. He captured images of Muhammad Ali in his gym as he trained for a fight. He took pictures of Robert De Niro for The New York Times.
For years, Visalli continued to shoot famous figures, despite occasionally becoming annoyed at people’s complaints that their best side wasn’t being shown. But after one assignment in particular, he felt a distinct need to move on.
Visalli had photographed Chilean president Salvador Allende shortly before the leader’s death in 1973. Visalli was proud to have that image grace the cover of Newsweek, but seeing the magazine being flipped through and then tossed out once the week was up bothered him greatly.
“I had pictures in that magazine,” he said. “My art went into that wastebasket! I was so upset that I thought, ‘Maybe I should do something more permanent than the weekly news.’”
His next direction, architecture books, gave his work a little more longevity, and led him two photograph buildings and structures, including New York’s twin towers.
The photographer captured things we only think of in the context of their obsolescence or destruction, or—in the case of J.F.K. or Martin Luther King—assassination. Visalli’s knack for capturing history is uncanny.
“When I saw Martin Luther King the first time,” Visalli remembered, “I said, ‘There is a man that will go down in history.’ That’s the feeling that I had when I was looking at him. I knew he was somebody special. I didn’t know he was going to be assassinated, but I knew that he was a historical person.
“Let me tell you one thing that has been going in my mind since I started,” he went on. “First of all, I’m recording for history. I may be presumptuous, but I always thought that whatever I click today, I always have to do it well, because people will look at it 200 years from now. And I understood at an early age that I was recording history. A 30th of a second—a 50th of a second—was a 50th of a second of history.”
Exhibition hangs through Feb. 19 at Cal Poly’s University Art Gallery. An artist’s talk takes place Jan. 7 at 5 p.m. in Building 34, room 227.
Anna Weltner is arts editor at New Times, the Sun’s sister paper to the north. Send comments to aweltner@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jan 6-13, 2011.
