Douglas McCulloh

Douglas McCulloh (born 1959, in Los Angeles) is an American photographer notable for conceptual photographic projects based on “systematic randomness” and chance operations. McCulloh’s work is “an extension of the traditions of street photography, social documentary photography, oral history and Surrealist chance operations,” states photo historian Jonathan Green. “As such, it is grounded in some of the century’s most powerful conceptual currents.” McCulloh is one of six photographers who in 2006 transformed an F-18 jet hangar into the world’s largest camera to make the world’s largest photograph. McCulloh also curates exhibitions, most notably Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists, the first major museum exhibition of work by blind photographers. McCulloh, under the nom-de-plume “Quoteman,” has also collected and posted online thousands of quotations about photography.

McCulloh holds B.A. degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara in renaissance history and sociology and an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University in photography and digital media. McCulloh writes that his “mother is a refugee and my father is a geologist.” 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’s art is conceptual in character, using chance systems to drive large photographic projects. He is clear about the goal: “Chance liberates us from the limitations of our intention,” McCulloh writes. “Chance subverts control, allowing art to become an opening into the world’s full complexity.” “Everybody feels like they have control over things,” McCulloh told interviewer Marilyn Thomsen in 2003, “but I think the world mostly operates by strange chance. If the world operates by chance, why not use [chance] as a way of encountering the world directly?” In 2009, McCulloh summarized his methods: “I create systems driven by chance operations: random sampling, chance drawings, map transects. Then I set the systems in motion and record what chance provides.” Art critic Christopher Miles positioned McCulloh’s strategy within art history: “In order to take both his own preconceptions and popular constructions out of the picture, Douglas McCulloh has done something clever and simple. 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.”

...
Wikipedia