Photographs from six years and twenty-thousand miles of chance-driven journeys across Los Angeles. 85 quadtone photographs in large 9"x12" album-style book. Accompanying essays by the photographer and six scholars. Original exhibition curated by Jonathan Green, director of the UCR/California Museum of Photography.

Chance Encounters : The L.A. Project

Arts & Photography

Jonathan Green

Douglas McCulloh

Photography & Video

Geographics

This book was published by UCR ARTSblock on the occasion of the exhibition Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists on view from May 2 to August 20, 2009 at UCR/California Museum of Photography.

Sight Unseen: International Photography By Blind Artists

UCR/California Museum of Photography

Documenting the birth of a suburb I can think of no other recent account of the suburbs that has the heartbreaking qualities of McCulloh s Dream Street. Only in the novels of the opening of the Great Plains at the turn of the century are the social, economic, and environmental forces that shaped the making of a place so clearly drawn, and on so human a scale. D. J. Waldie, from the Foreword In 1999, author and photographer Douglas McCulloh won the right from a charity auction to name a street in a yet-to-be-developed subdivision in Ontario, California. Curious about the construction process, McCulloh visited Dream Street regularly with his camera and interviewed the workers to chronicle the evolution of this new neighborhood. McCulloh s work centers on the men and women who work in construction and the first-time buyers struggling to purchase a piece of the California dream. As the tract of land progresses from an abandoned strawberry field to a jumble of wooden frames to the prototypical California suburban neighborhood, McCulloh builds a portrait of an industry whose workers most of whom are non-union and poorly paid know the American dream is far out of their reach. Many of the hopeful buyers who visit Dream Street are turned down for loans, as well, and by mid-2008, more than two hundred houses in the surrounding area were in some stage of foreclosure. In the tradition of revered photojournalists such as Robert Adams and Bill Owens, McCulloh s photos and interviews offer an insight into the human side of the process that has changed so much of Southern California from open ranchos to endless city in a single century. A prescient view of the crisis that was to befall America s housing market, Dream Street s story lends authority to the history and fate of Dream Streets everywhere.

Dream Street

Individual Artists

Heyday Books

From the title essay: 
Inland Southern California occupies the margin between two mythical landscapes of the American West--the wide-open spaces of the Basin and Range and the strange dream of Los Angeles. It is set between L.A.'s distillation of golden structures on hardscrabble streets and 500,000 square miles of saltbush, sage, and aspiration. It contains a little of both, and a lot of nothing at all. 
At its core, In the Sunshine of Neglect is [a book] about place and experiment. It is about artists using the rapidly developing spaces of Inland Southern California as a tabula rasa, a laboratory to dissect new subjects and deploy new approaches. In these interstitial spaces, this zone of neglect on the periphery of Los Angeles, artists have transformed extremity into new practice, banality into discovery. Some have been engaged here for long durations--even lifetimes, while others have cycled through like grad students visiting a research lab down the hall. But the entire current generation is influenced by the new avenues of photography established several of the artists--Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Judy Fiskin, Anthony Hernandez, Sant Khalsa, Laurie Brown, and others--not long ago in the West, this part of the West. 
In Inland Southern California, photographers criss-cross a landscape so stripped down, so newly manufactured that treasures can be found right at the surface, every surface. Most of [the] artists do not define their task as delving into development, decay, or decline. For the most part, they seek to simply look at the wide range of what is, as if looking can ever be simple. But it's fruitful to undertake the task in a place especially exposed and revealing. A place founded on faith in constant expansion, regardless of cultural or ecological consequences. A place willing to consistently erase the present for a stake in an imagined future. In short, a place that nakedly stands in for the Western World.

In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California, 1950 to the Present

Inlandia Institute

Fire as omen and elemental force, as metaphor and searing personal experience--these are the subjects Douglas McCulloh explores in Facing Fire: Art, Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the New West. 
California's diverse ecologies are fire-prone, fire-adapted, even fire-dependent. In the past two decades, however, West Coast wildfires have exploded in scale and severity. There is a powerful consensus that we have entered a new era--nature unbalanced, the end of the stable world. Douglas McCulloh has assembled the work of 16 artists who bring us incendiary images from active fire lines and psychic burn zones. 
Together the 16 artists face fire, sift its aftermath, struggle with its implications. Throughout is the uneasy sense that wildfire is a stand-in, a site of displacement for more immaterial fears, for the amorphous anxieties of the age. 
This book is published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name held at UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography February 22--August 9, 2020.

Facing Fire: Art, Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the New West

History & Criticism