Southern California is suffering another tremendous loss. Artist and Curator Douglas McCulloh sadly passed away on January 5th. He leaves an incredible legacy as a husband, friend, mentor, photographer, curator, and most importantly, troublemaker. Every e-mail from Doug ended with a sentence encouraging me to get into some trouble.

I think of Douglas as the Indiana Jones of the photography world, always in a dapper hat, his curiosity taking him into uncharted territories. His education reflects his vast array of interests that continued for his entire life: Master of Fine Arts (Photography and Digital Media) Claremont Graduate University, Bachelor of Arts, with honors (Renaissance History) University of California at Santa Barbara Bachelor of Arts, with honors (Sociology of Collective Behavior) University of California at Santa Barbara.

His final position was Interim Executive Director and Senior Curator of Exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography (UCR ARTS) where he mounted numerous compelling exhibitions.

We were friends for several decades and part of several collectives together. He had a deep intelligence balanced with a great sense of humor and curiosity and he always looked for possibilities.

In 2006, I drove to an abandoned southern California F-18 jet hangar with my friend and fellow photographer, Kathleen McLaughlin. The hanger had been turned into the world’s largest camera in order to make the world’s largest photograph. As part of the Legacy Project, Douglas, Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Clayton Spada and hundreds of volunteers spent thousands of hours transforming a Southern California military jet hanger into a gigantic camera. The aim was to make a single black and white photograph (pinhole)—by far the largest ever produced. On that fateful night, The Great Picture was created. It has a hot and steamy night, and in complete darkness, we set out to create, develop, and fix the largest photograph ever made. “The group hand-applied 80 liters of gelatin silver halide emulsion to a seamless 3,375-square-foot canvas substrate custom-made in Germany for the project. Development required a custom Olympic pool-sized developing tray, ten high-volume submersible pumps, and 1,800 gallons of black and white chemistry. The Big Picture is regarded as a punctuation mark at the end of 170 years of film-based photography and the start of the digital era. The project has been the centerpiece of solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles; Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; and Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans.”

The Great Picture

The Great Picture

Creating The Great Picture

Creating the Great Picture

Another one of Douglas’ fascinations were how blind photographers “see”. He was very connected to the blind community of photographers and we worked with him to create a series of posts on Lenscratch.  Douglas stated in one of the posts:

I’ve been obsessed with blindness and photography for almost three decades. I arrived carrying a clueless assumption: a blind artist making a photograph would be, literally, a shot in the dark. The images would be visual guesswork, chance operations. I placed blind and visually impaired photographers at the outer edge of photography. But I didn’t know anything then, and I was wrong about everything.

Here is the truth. Blind photographers operate at the heart of the medium; they are the zero point of photography. Blind photographers occupy the immaculate center—image as idea, idea as image. These artists privilege inner vision over mere outer sight. For them, as for the finest photographic artists, making images is, first and foremost, a mental operation. These artists visualize first, then make a photographic reproduction of the original that exists in their mind.

©Kurt Weston

Douglas also curated an extensive exhibition at the California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTS, Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists, that has been traveling internationally for the last 14 years. 

At the heart of his passions was his own photographic practice. He had a unique way of seeing the Southland, slightly off kilter and a tad frenetic, immersing himself in the region, in the people and their stories. One of his series, Dream Street, looked at the marketing of dreams in collision with the housing crash. As he stated: “I won the right to name a street in Southern California”.  The chance win at a charity event launched McCulloh into an obsessive relationship with a 134-home subdivision just commencing in Southern California. Captivated by the creation of this new neighborhood, he haunted the place he named Dream Street, vividly chronicling the lives of builders, workers, and prospective homebuyers with his camera and tape recorder. McCulloh puts a human face on the process that has shaped so much of America. And by a fateful quirk of timing, McCulloh’s presence at Dream Street also cuts a clean slice straight through the heart of the U.S. housing boom and bust.  His website shares a terrific narration of the work (and a great way to hear his voice).

©Douglas McCulloh, from Dream Street

©Douglas McCulloh, from Dream Street

©Douglas McCulloh, from Dream Street

Douglas had a continuing fascination with Hollywood resulting in the project, Lost Among the Stars: 60,000 Photographs in Hollywood. The project was a massive and multi-layered artistic inquiry. Map-driven and infused with data and first-hand narrative, the project moves beyond traditions of the isolated photographic image. Instead the project emphasizes complexity, multiplicity, extreme volume, and the interplay of image, data, map, and text.

©Douglas McCulloh, from Lost Among the Stars

©Douglas McCulloh, from Lost Among the Stars

©Douglas McCulloh, from Lost Among the Stars

©Douglas McCulloh, from Lost Among the Stars

©Douglas McCulloh, from Lost Among the Stars

The first book Douglas ever gave me was Chance Encounters, another system and map-based concept of photographing Los Angeles.The photographs are from seven years of chance-driven journeys across Los Angeles. It’s storytelling at its best, snippets of life only to be remembered for as long as the photographs are seen.

The artist spent seven years going to chance-selected spots across the 1,287.75 square miles of urban Los Angeles County. This photographic sampling project is controlled by a map gridded into 5,151 quarter-mile squares. McCulloh began each day of photography by pulling chance coordinates that select a random quarter-mile square. McCulloh then travelled to that quarter-mile square with a single camera and 18mm wide angle lens, speaking with almost everyone he encountered.

The project’s core is the Dada/Surrealist idea that chance can liberate us from the limitations of preconception, intention, and self. The artist drove more than 22,000 miles and made 23,000 photographs.

“McCulloh’s working method avoids pitfalls by adopting the Dadaist strategy of leaving things to chance,” states Los Angeles Times art critic William Wilson. “He selects areas at random, spending a day shooting whatever he finds – beach, slum or riverbed slime.” The results, writes Wilson, are “intrinsically fascinating, sociologically revealing and artistically instructive…. The exhibition’s melding of the intimate and the epic, simply put, add up to the best thing of its kind I’ve ever seen.”

Photographs from Chance Encounters have been exhibited and published widely. A book and traveling exhibition were originated by the California Museum of Photography. The work is again accompanied by a narration of each photograph on his website.

©Douglas McCulloh, from Chance Encounters

©Douglas McCulloh, from Chance Encounters

©Douglas McCulloh, from Chance Encounters

©Douglas McCulloh, from Chance Encounters

©Douglas McCulloh, from Chance Encounters

One of Douglas’ greatest attributes was that he could talk to anyone. He was fascinated by people’s stories. He had that great quality of making people feel seen. He was someone who could say YES when you asked…and that’s a rare thing.

Douglas also had a vast collection of photographer’s quotes…these are the last two he sent me:

“Almost all photographers have incurred large expenses in the pursuit of tiny audiences, finding that the wonder they’d hoped to share is something few want to receive.” — Robert Adams

“The best way to make money with a camera is to sell it.” –Andrew Savulich

Douglas, thank you for being such a stellar human being, thank you for celebrating and elevating this community, thank you for your deep seeing and thinking, and most importantly, thank you for being my friend.