Since 1992, Douglas McCulloh has shot photographs and collected stories within precise one quarter-mile-square locations randomly drawn from a 5,151 square grid that covers all of Los Angeles County. McCulloh's project is an extension of the traditions of street photography, social documentary photography, oral history and Surrealist chance operations. As such, it is grounded in some of the century's most powerful conceptual currents.

First, McCulloh's documentary photography of L.A. follows in the grand tradition of American street photography derived from the heritage of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Like his predecessors, McCulloh is fascinated with a photographic description that simultaneously explores the formal possibilities of photographic organization while providing a commentary on the political, social and cultural world. Yet, while McCulloh's predecessors artfully documented the quotidian reality of the social landscape through which they moved, they did so with a certain psychological and aesthetic remove from their subjects. They were voyeurs, outsiders looking in, carefully recording a world across the distance established by the camera between photographer and subject. McCulloh, on the other hand, actively engages his subjects in both conversation and participation. His camera's extreme 18 mm lens means he is never more than inches from his subject. He snaps very few images unawares or without consent. He embellishes each image with an anecdote or story. This radical commitment to human engagement differentiates his work from his lineage, producing a new aesthetic that minimizes the significance of the work as personal observation and increases its meaning as communal commentary. The complex framing and formal devises of McCulloh's photography lead not toward abstraction and solipsism, as in much of Winogrand's and Friedlander's work, but toward a shared community consciousness that reveals the nature of contemporary Los Angeles. As an artist, McCulloh demonstrates a profound commitment to listening as well as recording, to remembering the history of his chosen art form as well as endeavoring to reveal new ways of describing one of the most frequently photographed regions of the world.

Second and paradoxically, behind the passionate intensity of the images and stories that make up the LA Project, lies the cold, mechanically disengaged workings of a random operation process that sends McCulloh to his chance weekly assignations with landscape, flesh and blood. Yet, as many twentieth century writers and artists of Surrealist and Dada persuasion before him, McCulloh utilizes the impersonal nature of chance operation to probe more deeply into his own psyche and the psyche of Los Angeles. In following chance, McCulloh overtly acknowledges what practitioners of the little 20th Century mechanical image-capturing device, the camera, have long known: unexpected material always serves the purpose of perception and the sighting of the marvelous and extraordinary much better than the preordained.

The museum is indebted to literary and cultural studies critics John Ganim, Richard Lid, Douglas Eisner and Cynthia Morrill; city historian Anthea Hartig; and art historian Jo-Anne Berelowitz for their essays which help expand our understanding of McCulloh's work and of Los Angeles. The museum gratefully acknowledges the support of the California Council for the Humanities for this exhibition's public programs. There has also been a remarkable synergy in the collaborations between Doug McCulloh and the staff of UCR/CMP. Invaluable support for his project has been provided by Associate Director, Cathleen Walling; Museum Writer, Cynthia Morrill; Curator of Exhibitions, Kevin Jon Boyle; Media Projects Coordinator, Ted Fisher; Educator, Karen Rapp; and Exhibit Specialist, Stephen Clugston.

Finally, I remain personally grateful to Doug McCulloh and Dawn Hassett for their friendship and for their heroic involvement in all phases of the planning and funding of the exhibition. LA Project offers a rich, powerful, and accomplished vision of a place that haunts and tantalizes the American and world imagination. And appropriately, it is a vision that has been initiated in Riverside, California, Doug McCulloh's home town and the location of UCR/CMP. In the several years that have led up to this book and exhibition, I have had the pleasure of discovering that a remarkably inventive photographer was working in my own backyard, getting to know Doug, and working with him on this show. Both chance and fate conspired to bring this project to light. As Andre Breton said in the Manifesto of Surrealism, "Photography? I don't see any reason why not."

Jonathan Green

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