Monumental photo returns home to Irvine
‘The Great Picture,’ documenting a former Marine base, can be seen through May 7.
After the 1999 decommissioning of Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, six artists and photographers came together to create the Legacy Project. The group set out to document as much as they could of the sprawling 4,800acre military base near Irvine in order to preserve its history.
The group captured the Marine base in photo sessions over the course of 15 years, producing one particular marvel: “The Great Picture,” a 31-by-111-foot shot overlooking the control tower and twin runways.
The massive photo is featured at a new exhibit at Great Park in Irvine. “The Great Picture: Making the World’s Largest Photograph” will be open through May 7 at Palm Court Arts Complex.
The photograph has been shown around the world, including at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
The Legacy Project started as a modest plan but took years to complete as the ambitions of its members — Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh and Clayton Spada — grew. Four of them taught in the photo department at Cypress College, including the late Burchfield, who lobbied to give students access to the base and document it as it went through its transition.
“Very quickly, it became apparent to us that this shouldn’t be a one-off thing,” said Spada. “There was a significance to this base. It was so much a part of Orange County history that we felt that we had to document this thing.
“We wanted to do a longterm, basically open-ended, project to document this space as it was then and as it would change to whatever it became — whether it was Great Park or another airport or whatever,” he said.
The site is now dominated by Great Park and housing developments.
The group’s work included several photographic projects. At one point, the team shot a photo in each of the cardinal directions every 60 feet. They also took pictures of the approximately 1,800 buildings on the base.
“The Great Picture” was just one part of the collaboration, but it was an undertaking like no other.
“We pulled it off through the help of probably 400 volunteers, at one time or another,” Garnier, president of the Legacy Project, said. “To me, that was one of the really exciting things about this project was the collaboration. People would find out about this project, and they’d get really enthused by it and wanted to be part of something that was larger than all of us.”
The photo was shot July 6, 2006, from a jet hangar that was converted into a camera obscura. Spada had been working with camera obscura images in China when he brought the idea to the others over drinks.
“There was a row of former jet hangars, helicopter squadron hangars that were facing the control towers that would have just made beautiful camera obscuras, so we picked one and went from there,” Spada said.
To create the image, the hangar had to be dark. Using a 400-pound piece of muslin, it became the world’s largest pinhole camera. A 6-millimeter pinhole was placed in the doors of the hangar, and it was exposed for 35 minutes before the image was processed within the building.
“It was fortunate that we had beer, because if we had any inkling of what we would have gotten ourselves into, we would have easily talked our way out of it, just the logistics of this,” Spada said. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
In addition to contributing to the legacy of the military base, “The Great Picture” highlights an inf lection point for photography.
“The piece that we created was almost right at that perfect transition point as photography migrated from analog to digital,” Garnier said. “We created something in an analog manner. Within 24 hours, digital reproductions of what we had created were floating around the internet, in newspapers, all around the world. It’s kind of interesting how something made analog became digital almost instantaneously.”