Franco Salmoiraghi graduated from Southern Illinois University in 1965, and has an MFA from Ohio University. He came to Hawai‘i in 1968 to teach photography in the Art Department of the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa. His teaching extended to being a lecturer at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, as well as Pacific New Media while also working as a freelance photographer doing work for books and magazines.
He is a recipient of the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship as well as being a two-time recipient of the Baciu Visual Arts Award, in 1998 and 2003, for “innovation and risk taking” for his work at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, now known as the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Franco’s prints are included in the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Art in Public Places Collection, as well as the Neiman Marcus Collection, Honolulu Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Bishop Museum, Halekūlani Hotel, and many other public and private collections.
His documentary photographs of Hawai‘i include natural, historic and local people and cultural life as well as storied and sacred places such as Waipi‘o Valley and the island of Kaho‘olawe.
He has an extensive archive of photographs, made in Hawai‘i, as well as other places he has lived or traveled. Many of the photographs from Hawai‘i were made during the Hawaiian cultural renaissance, a rich period of growth and resurgence of the Hawaiian culture; a significant divergence from a tourism- based culture among other works from the 1960s to 2000s. He is organizing his thousands of negatives and prints with the hope of placing them in a permanent archive where they may be utilized as a historical record.
He continues to photograph, almost daily . . . mostly whatever he randomly encounters in Mānoa Valley; especially his cat, Popo, and the clouds flowing down the valley.