Gary San Pietro passed away on June 27th 2017.

Gary San Pietro breaking down at Gracie Square 1997

I’ve known Gary for about 40 years from the time we met at my first outdoor art show at Gracie Square in New York. Besides my wife, Gary is the closest I had to a best friend. Over time, as we both cut back on shows we stopped seeing each other but spoke at least every month or so, the last time about a month or two before he passed.

Gary was a true artist and his medium was photography. Camera equipment was inconsequential. In film days, when he created most of his images, his paint brush was a simple camera body with an inexpensive zoom lens and an inexpensive tripod. Each piece of transparency film was a canvas. I’ve known him to travel in Europe for three weeks and come back with less than 100 pictures (under three rolls) taken. But each exposure was a masterpiece.

A perfectionist, Gary sat with me for three days while I created his web site. Besides choosing the images and image order for each gallery, he specified that each enlarged image had the exact proportion of white space around it to signify exactly how much mat each image would have when purchased. He was the same when he set up his booth, using a level to make sure everything was presented perfectly. I’m leaving his web site up for at least the next year or so. http://GarySanPietro.com

Gary San Pietro booth picture at Manayunk

Gary was one of the most giving and loving people I’ve ever met and almost everyone who met him considered him to be a friend. Every time he left his house to drive to a show, he would make arrangements to stop and see friends before driving home. He always made time for people who needed him.

His one vice was that he was a heavy smoker. We once tried to do an intervention to get him to stop but it never worked. He was diagnosed with lung cancer a few years ago and survived the operation but had started smoking again because it made him feel good though, he know it might eventually kill him.