Recently, in a piece for the New Yorker, screenwriter and novelist Michael Tolkin lamented of Los Angeles,

"This is a hard city for holding memories. The absence of real seasons makes time pass without easy markers, and the loss of real politics surrenders to the arrhythmia of riot, scandal, and natural disaster. The sad, brilliant beauty of the place, the January sky after the rains, with snow on the San Gabriels and every thin wire on the radio towers of Mt. Wilson visible thirty miles away, or the city at night, seen from a plane as it comes over San Bernardino, or the crowds of Hispanics in Griffith Park on a Sunday afternoon; these and a million other impressions have been stripped of specific local truth by all the movies set there arbitrarily by Hollywood."

Remarkably, LA Project, rooted in an artistic practice of the first half of the twentieth century, in random moments and chance encounters, seems an answer to Tolkin's complaint. But who would have expected that Surrealism might be key to the deconstruction of a place where the myths, fantasies and nightmares of a "golden land" have so successfully usurped "the sad, brilliant beauty" of a city?

The affinity between photography and Surrealism seems less surprising. In her widely known book On Photography, Susan Sontag finds photography to be an art form that has managed to carry out "the grandiose, century-old threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility." For Sontag photographs are surreal because they "don't seem deeply beholden to the intentions of the artist" and are instead the result of an uncertain causal relationship between a photographer, a subject and an "automated machine." Further, according to Sontag, "What renders a photograph surreal is its refutation of pathos as a message from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class." Or, put somewhat differently, "What is surreal is the distance imposed, and bridged, by the photograph: the social distance and the distance of time." Sontag sees photography as "natively surreal" but, as she also points out, that is not to say that "it shares the destinies of the official Surrealist movement." That photography that does attempt to embrace Surrealist aesthetics through manipulation of the image, for example, is for Sontag "redundant" and possibly a failure.

What Sontag does not anticipate is a photography rooted in Surrealist theory. In using a system of random selection to determine LA Project photography sites from a 5,151 square grid that maps the project area, McCulloh has employed the principles of Surrealism as a strategy for art-making. Through this methodology of random "core-sampling," McCulloh seeks a vision of Los Angeles that traditional linear models of documentary, history and narrative cannot generate, a vision that concentrates upon the complexity found in daily life. By means of Surrealist chance operations McCulloh hopes to be able to engage in what he quotes John Cage in calling "the open, unpredictably changing world of everyday living."

Put another way, McCulloh detects in Surrealism the possibility of investigating a path without the dull drag of preconception; Surrealism offers him the means to evade intention, undermine assumption, and subvert (if not relinquish) control. In LA Project, commonly held expectations of Los Angeles grounded upon the city's representation within movies, novels, television and other popular culture forms hold no quarter. Similarly, currently in favor master narratives characterizing Los Angeles as sign of apocalyptic global capitalism, rapturous pastiche, a city of surfaces without content are held meaningless. Surrealist chance operations enable McCulloh to come to terms with Los Angeles without betraying its characteristic social, cultural and geographic fragmentation and to offer viewers instead a representation of the city founded upon particular moments of individual engagement.

But LA Project disrupts more than the conventional depiction of Los Angeles. If the photographs of LA Project complicate the visual short hand that stands for Los Angeles, of ocean views and Mulholland Drive, of the L.A. skyline and the freeway system, of seismic upheaval and trouble in the 'hood', of overwhelming poverty and conspicuous consumption, their accompanying captions perturb narrative expectations honed in James M. Cain and Joan Didion, film noir and "beach blanket bingo," the eleven o'clock news and Aaron Spelling productions.

From a chance encounter on November 26, 1995:

When Fernando X was 19, his older brother was pulled over on a suspected DUI traffic stop and beaten to death by Los Angeles County Sheriffs. He heard the two officers involved are now in law enforcement in Texas. Against his mother's wishes, he himself went to the L. A. County Sheriff's Academy and now works as a fire paramedic. He and his wife have transformed their house into a five bedroom, two story structure with a sunken office and two jacuzzi tubs, but his dream is to move to the nearly all white Orange County community of Laguna Niguel.

In the photograph, we see Fernando leaning upon the open gate at his driveway; he appears to be speaking. Behind him is his home, garage door open, potted plants neatly arranged. While the photograph neatly presents middle-class life in the City of Angels, the story of Fernando's life defies easy reconciliation. Somehow we must understand his willing participation in the organization whose representatives killed his brother in combination with his work as a fire paramedic. Is he to be regarded as a Latino man who has submitted to the pull of white assimilation or as an individual who has come to terms with the death of his brother through actively saving the lives of others? Can we assume that his desire to move to the "nearly all white" community of Laguna Niguel signals an answer to this question, or should we ponder if his desire is rooted in other unknown matters or reasons? The conclusions that we reach probably tell us more about ourselves than about the photograph.

McCulloh's interactions with the "the open, unpredictably changing world of everyday living" also leave open conclusions about his chance encounters. His late twentieth century use of Surrealism while not entirely in keeping with its origins in the irrational, the subconscious, dreams and fantasy remains loyal to its eschewing of resolution. Indeed, LA Project remains itself a work in progress. Begun in 1992, McCulloh continues its procedures.

The Los Angeles found in LA Project is a Los Angeles stripped of its common fictions to reveal something far more precious. It offers means to circumvent long held and paradoxical notions of Los Angeles as both the promise of a New Jerusalem and the harbinger of Armageddon, presenting instead a view of the city that is the measure of the myth that overloads the American imagination even as it eschews the virtual knowledge found in popular culture in favor of direct contact with the city's neighborhoods and citizens. McCulloh's "chance encounters" reveal a cityscape more complex than its typical representations in popular culture and mass media would allow. The dual and antipodal views of Los Angeles, palm trees against a cloudless blue sky versus a decaying infrastructure falling to fire, earthquake, mud slides, and riots are complicated by LA Project's revealing of such places as black middle class neighborhoods of tract homes with neatly tended lawns and industrial areas that might just as likely be located in the rust belt cities of the Mid-West. McCulloh observes that "For the Surrealists chance association was the purest method of evoking what Andre Breton called 'the marvelous'." Who would have imagined that the marvelous in Los Angeles could be found through an artist's Surrealist sampling of the commonplace, the prosaic and the ordinary?

Cynthia Morrill

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