While many of the people who have made Oregon State University what it is today did so through the implementations of personal visions, John Garman's impact on this University is due to his rejection of grand visions. The irony of this lies in that his primary area of interest and expertise was photography, the art of capturing visions. Garman concentrated on the practical aspects of photography, believing the purpose of photo-graphy was "to make accurate and usable records of how things worked, and how they were built, and what they were for, and how they were adapted to their use ..."¹

Garman's father was an achitect and builder, and had travelled to the West Coast several times. During one trip to the West Coast, he met the woman who would become John's mother. John Clifton Garman was born September 22, 1896, in Urbana, Illinois. He had one elder sister, who died in 1932. John's father brought the family to Portland, Oregon, sometime between 1898 and 1900, and worked as an achitect and builder until an accident circa 1908 damaged Garman senior's eyesight and ended his career as an architect. John's father also did custom wood-working for the Pullman Railroad Car Company. After 1908, the family lived in Millersburg, but returned to Portland in 1912, where John entered Benson Polytechnic High School.

As a child, John sometimes worked for his father, assisting in the making of architectural plans. This skill was revived when he got to Oregon Agricultural College (OAC), where he worked, among other jobs, making blueprints in the Administration Building. Other jobs in high school included performing electrical repairs. After high school, he worked for the Stanley Steamer Agency, Northwest Power Co., Pacific Car and Foundry Co., and the Portland Traction Co.

In addition to his interest and aptitude for electronics, John Garman was also an accomplished musician, the B flat clarinet being his instrument. As with many of Garman's interests, music was one that he carried through most of his life. While at OAC, he was a member of the band and orchestra all four years, a frequent soloist, as well as the manager of the band his junior and senior years. He was a member of Kappa Kappa Psi, the Music honors society, in its early years at OAC.

In 1917, John Garman and a friend made a bicycle trip from Portland to Corvallis, where they enrolled at OAC. They had intended to travel to Eugene to consider enrolling at the University of Oregon, but the two decided that they had travelled far enough for that trip.⊃2 John studied electrical engineering, specializing in telephony, but World War I forced him to take a year from his studies to serve his country, and his musical skills and band experience made him a natural candidate to train recruits in basic marching and drill, which he did; he also was in the Army Band.

Although he had been given a camera as a child, he did not take a serious interest in photograpy until an Army friend reintroduced him to it while in camp. Upon his return, John began taking elective courses in photography from R.W. Uphoff, was involved in some of the early work on synchronous flash devices and some early work in commercial applications of color photography. Garman continued his studies in electrical engineering and graduated with honors in 1922. Before graduating, he founded the OAC chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, the Electrical Engineering honors society, and served as the first president of OAC's chapter. In 1933, Garman completed a Masters Degree in Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, taking classes in the summers of 1928 through 1932.

After graduation, Garman spent the summer of 1922 working for the Western Electric Co., in their telephony division. He then returned to OAC as a half-time instructor in the engineering department. R. W. Uphoff left OAC during that year to pursue photography, and John Garman was hired in September 1923 to replace him as instructor of Photography in the Physics Department.

Despite having been in the Army, John Garman had a great love for hiking, and the terrain around OAC provided him with many opportunities for hiking trips. During these he was in the company of, or encountered many of OAC's faculty. By making several of his hiking trips into photographic expeditions, Garman not only made photo studies of the area, and laid many of the foundations that would make his services as a photographer sought by OAC's faculty. In addition to his generally good rapport with the faculty of OAC, Garman enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the Journalism Department, providing instruction and lab facilities to many of their students.

Without the practical-minded approach to photography of John Garman, Oregon State might never have created its Photographic Services. It was Garman, working with Ed Yunker, who created the Photo Services in the 1924-25 academic year, when they realized that the photographic work that they and others had been performing for the other departments was interfering with thier ability to do the work for which the college had hired them. Even after the formal creation of Photo Services, Garman was so heavily involved that in some years that part of his salary had to be paid by Photo Services, and in at least one year he was given a special hourly payment for performing "photographic work for other departments on campus."³

So much in demand were Garman's services as a photographer, and so popular were his courses in photography, that commercial photographers in the area attempted to convince the state legislature to restrict non-amateur photography and the teaching of photography to "licensed" photographers. The law did not pass, and Garman's sheer usefulness eventually overcame their objections to his being a source of competition.

As an instructor, John Garman did not simply teach students how to point a camera at something and push a button; he insisted that his students understand the optics of a camera, the geometry of using lenses and of composition, and the chemistry of films and printing processes. His attitude toward the study of photography, in his own words, "Processes are being continually changed and improved and if you don't have a basic understanding of them the first change licks you. So, we found it advisable to teach people basic understandings of photography. Not, just training."*

John Garman retired at the end of the 1965-66 academic year, after 45 years of teaching photography. After his retirement, when the decision was made to move the instruction of photography to the Art Department, John Garman was the natural choice to help the new caretakers of photography set up classes, labs, etc.

During the time that Garman was building Photographic Services, he also found time to meet and court Florence Goff, whom he married on June 14, 1925. Florence had been a student at OAC when the two met. The couple had three children, Shirley, LouAnne, and Bruce, and eventually had eleven grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren. They were married for almost 63 years, until Florence's death in April of 1988. John Garman passed away on November 20, 1989.