Established by Marilyn Rigler and her sons Joel and Mark, the proceeds from the David Rigler Photography Endowment will be used by the Head of Special Collections first to preserve, organize, and make known and accessible to the faculty and students of UCSC and to the general public, the remarkable photographic collections, and second, to support the needs of the photographic collection, including the acquisition of new works.

David Rigler, Ph.D., (April 9, 1921 – April 4, 2014) was a creative, wise, warm and thoughtful man, a natural engineer and technologist with a wealth of knowledge and interest in many diverse fields. As a child, David taught himself about electricity, electronics, and mechanical things by taking apart phones, watches, and cameras. At age 13, he was given a box camera that initiated his lifelong hobby of becoming an avid photographer. As a young adult, he joined the nascent and influential Camera Club of New York. Later in life, he’d transitioned to video, video editing, digital SLR and Photoshop.

During World War II, as a Navy enlistee, he worked in the Panama Canal Zone, maintaining an early, top-secret radar installation. Returning to civilian life, David Rigler shifted his professional life to focus on helping people, particularly children. He was one of the first pediatric psychologists to work with seriously ill children and their parents in hospital settings. As a professor at USC, he broadened his expertise to the academic world, training graduate students in clinical psychology.

David met his life-long love, Marilyn, at Ohio University. They were married in 1948. Always inseparable, they would have celebrated their 65th anniversary in 2014, the year David sadly passed away.