For six years I have wandered at random across the twelve-hundred-square-miles of Los Angeles, directed by the impersonal hand of chance -- the self thinning and spreading like spilled oil on water. For a day at a time, I become the stranger in the neighborhood, the outsider alone, the wanderer with a camera. In thousands of chance encounters with people in these random locations, the conversation's compass inevitably swings about and points to a single question: "Why are you here?" After all these times, I still start with a slightly surprised laugh and say, "Believe it or not, I'm here by chance." This essay is simply a slight expansion of that answer. To honor the people I have met, I will do my best to keep the explanation clear, complex, and interesting.

The core idea of Chance Encounters: The L.A. Project is that chance can help liberate us from the limitations of preconception, intention, and self. Most often, we see things not the way they are, but the way we are. But chance, by definition, is beyond our control and thus can be used to open us to the world as it is, rather than the way we think it will be or should be. This is why random sampling is central to so much scientific inquiry. Additionally, using chance to approach the world fits seamlessly with photography's paramount characteristic: the ability to interact instantaneously with the disarray and wonder of the actual. Out of this swift collaboration between chance and the camera can come traces of the real -- photographs which cast light on the human experience in realms ranging from the relatively simple such as economic relationships and cultural change to the extremely complex such as everyday life.

How did I take these ideas and make them concrete? Chance Encounters: The L.A. Project uses a map covering all of urban Los Angeles County, a vast tangle of streets. It is roughly my height and about ten feet long and is mounted in three sections on rigid black boards. The map is divided into a grid of one-quarter-mile squares. Exactly 5,151 squares cover the 1,287.75 square-miles of urban Los Angeles County. Each square has a unique "address." The north-south coordinates are labeled with letters: A to MMMM; the east-west coordinates with numbers: 1 to 144.

The years have transformed my use of this map into a small ritual. I reach to the top of the tall cabinet in the darkroom and bring down two containers. One holds letters, the other numbers. I shake them both very thoroughly and listen to the shunt of the chips as they tumble. From each container I draw a chip. My forefinger traces across miles of the clogged basin as I match the letter and the number to the map. I check and double-check the coordinates. I copy a section of the map to use as reference while I walk and precisely color the one-quarter-mile-square. I get in the car, note the time and the mileage, and spend an entire day enjoying the paradoxical freedom of walking within the square's exact boundaries.

I use simple equipment: a single camera, black and white film. Every photograph, 19,837 at the time of this writing, has been taken with the same 18mm lens. A very wide lens is vastly inclusive: the world must be accepted whole and as it is. Yet wide lenses ultimately concentrate attention on what is immediately at hand -- the photographic equivalent of the Buddhist philosophy of accepting the world, but living in the moment.

As I walk, I am surrounded by nothing but ordinary things, people, events -- so ordinary as to have been entirely forgotten. "A poem," wrote William Carlos Williams, "can be made out of anything." My approach is simple: to wander unknown territory receptive to unfolding circumstances, open to chance encounters. I speak to almost everyone I encounter, sometimes in passing, sometimes for hours. Photographs of people in the L.A. Project come out of direct and genuine engagement.

Chance is how the world works. All of us are born through an infinity of accidents and we live out our lives in a great fog of unpredictability. This project adopts the world's very mode of operation, chance, as the best means to embrace its full complexity and irrationality. Such dedication to chance may, to some, carry the scent of whim or lack of serious intent, but the opposite is true. Embracing chance requires commitment because time's arrow points forward only. In a world directed by chance, one must be completely committed to paths chosen by chance and to steps which can never be retraced.

For the dadaists and surrealists, of course, chance is the purest method of evoking what Andre Breton called the marvelous -- the beauty latent in everyday life. The Surrealists see chance as more fertile than control and value uncertainty above predictability. This view inverts some commonplace notions of art. Instead of master creator, the artist is just one player in a complex and uncontrollable joint effort. Rather than a guided act of creative heroism, art is a rough and capricious collaboration between the artist, the viewer, and the unforeseeable, unrepeatable actions of chance.

These ideas could be applied anywhere: Jakarta, Amsterdam, the Amazon basin, the Reichstag, your bedroom. This project uses them to encounter Los Angeles. What better place to explore the connection between Surrealist ideas and photography than the Daliesque urban tangle which now plays a double role on the world stage as both utopia and dystopia? It also is an opportunity to draw some conclusions about the 1930s tug-of-war between the Bauhaus and the Surrealists over the future of the city. The Bauhaus envisioned a coherent city, a cerebral creation of beautiful, useful structures set within green natural spaces and linked by efficient new methods of transportation. De Chirico, on the other hand, summarized the Surrealist notion of the city in paintings of irrational cityscapes peopled by wanderers within labyrinths of ambiguous streets slashed by stark light and shadows. As we approach the millennium, an unblinking random sample of Los Angeles makes clear that the Bauhaus were deranged dreamers and de Chirico an insightful realist.

L.A.'s current status as a utopian-dystopian binary darkstar is given special poignancy by the exuberance of the city's creation mythology. California historian Kevin Starr refers to the genesis of Los Angeles as "a dream, an invented place, a utopia, a place for which there is no prototype." When a city begins as a self-proclaimed utopia, this origin gives sharp definition to its ultimate trajectory. Today, Los Angeles has become the prototype for emerging mega-cities, with vociferous growth beyond the rational guidance of both profiteers and planners. One can imagine the Dadaists' joy in happening upon L.A. as a found object, a self-creating, self-destroying automatic machine. The Dadaists delighted in the acceptance of evanescence as evidence of the world as capricious and meaningless. L.A. has become a paradoxical evolving monument to impermanence and erasure, from the fractured base of its shaky geophysical setting through its makeshift, recycled architecture and churning, diverse arriviste population.

I sometimes view my journeys through the metropolis as chance operation travelogues in Baudelaire's fourmillante citŽ -- an "ant swarming City, City full of dreams/Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve." In Los Angeles, the specter tugging at our sleeves is the future. Stendhal's famous definition of the novel -- a mirror carried along a road -- describes Chance Encounters: The L.A. Project in a strangely literal way, but the roads have been chosen by chance operations and the mirror has been swung about at random. My goal has been whatever nobility lies in facing the world directly. The reason to do so was stated by Somerset Maugham in his 75th year: "I think there is in the heroic courage with which man confronts the irrationality of the world a beauty greater than the beauty of art."

Douglas McCulloh

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