Douglas McCulloh

"[8] Because of an upbringing that highlighted both uncontrollable change and deep time, McCulloh states he "has believed since childhood that the world operates mainly by chance.

McCulloh merely merged the tradition of social documentary photography á la Robert Frank with the Surrealist approach of creating a system that forces the artist to act at the mercy of chance.

"[10] Chance Encounters is a photographic sampling project controlled by a map gridded into 5,151 quarter-mile squares that encompass all of urban Los Angeles County.

[12] "McCulloh's working method avoids pitfalls by adopting the Dadaist strategy of leaving things to chance", stated Los Angeles Times art critic William Wilson.

[2] With a high resolution camera and studio lighting, McCulloh and collaborator Jacques Garnier made photographs on beaches in California and Florida over a seven-year period.

"[13] The photographers set up studio lighting at crowded beaches and "sample the passing parade like scientists who periodically dip water out of a flowing stream.

[18] A short documentary about the project reveals the working methodology – four digital shooting stations built into the fair's fine art pavilion; one image of each person is made and a database created with subject's answers to five questions: first name, age, gender, and zip code, and "What makes you unique?

"[18] 20,000 Portraits was in the vanguard of database-driven art projects and has been shown widely, most prominently in the LA Freewaves 2002 New Media Biennial in Los Angeles.

[24][25] The 134-home, 40-acre subdivision is a microcosm of the new economy, a site where issues of race and gender, immigration and exploitation, hopes and dreams animate a classic California landscape.

[29] The Great Picture is the largest photograph ever made as a single seamless image, produced on July 8, 2006, using a Southern California jet hangar transformed into a giant camera.

[32] It was made by The Legacy Group; (Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh, and Clayton Spada).

The photograph is of the control tower and runways at the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, Orange County, California.

"[35] Artists included in Sight Unseen are Ralph Baker, Evgen Bavčar, Henry Butler, Pete Eckert, Bruce Hall, Annie Hesse, Rosita McKenzie, Gerardo Nigenda, Michael Richard, Seeing With Photography Collective, Kurt Weston, and Alice Wingwall.

Sight Unseen was shown at UCR/California Museum of Photography from May 2 to August 29, 2009, and has since traveled to the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C.; Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; and Flacon, Moscow.