Dispatches: The Photography of Douglas McCulloh
Dispatches: The Photography of Douglas McCulloh is the first of McCulloh's books to present all major projects from his influential and prolific career. Dispatches charts the ideas and themes that thread through his projects, most notably Chance Encounters, Lost Among the Stars 60,000 Photographs in Hollywood, On the Beach: Chance Portraits from Two Shores, Dream Street, and American Cross. Each years-long endeavor employs different strategies that free the image-making from intention and yields rich, important glimpses into the world as it is.
From the introduction:
Douglas McCulloh's philosophy had deep roots in both chance and surrealism: "My goal as an artist is not to be a creator, but a conduit." In that single sentence lies the essence of his work. He believed the camera was a way of participating in the world's unfolding. McCulloh used chance to enter the world on equal terms and he built rules to obey randomness and thus disarm the hierarchies and dualities that photography so often enforces. He knew that the world reveals itself most clearly when we allow it to speak. Chance, properly embraced, becomes collaboration with the world's own intelligence.
McCulloh joined a lineage of artists and writers who used the ordinary as their oracle. He shared with Walt Whitman the urge to catalogue America and with composer John Cage the faith that the sounds of the world itself might be sufficient. His work is suffused with wonder, even when it faces despair. He understood that to yield control is not to abdicate authorship but to expand it.
McCulloh used this rhythm to teach himself how to listen. He began to understand that randomness was not opposed to meaning but was a deeper substrate in meaning. Quoting John Cage, he wrote: "The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation."
McCulloh's projects reflected his desire to meet the world as directly as possible. He set in motion structures that invited chance in order to cast his net for discovery and inquiry out into new and unknown terrain and circumstance. He listened carefully to what the world offered in return.
We see the evolution of the artist's philosophy with each new project. From his first chance-driven photographic explorations of Los Angeles in the 1990s to the vast cross-continental project, American Cross, that occupied him at the end of his life, Doug McCulloh built an art premised on the idea that discovery occurs when control is relinquished. He believed that photography, the most apparently intentional of mediums, could be made into a field experiment in openness and curiosity.
Most of the series presented here had already been published, exhibited, and were broadly known in the world of contemporary photography. Each project begins with a system--a grid, a line, an algorithm, a set of coordinates, but what emerges is always human: faces glimpsed at crosswalks, landscapes balanced between beauty and banality, the tremor of life inside pattern. The rules were simple, but their consequences profound: every place, every person, every moment carried equal possibility. The system abolished preference. The grid, indifferent to wealth or poverty, fame or anonymity, led him into every register of human life.
Dispatches situates McCulloh firmly within the evolving story of California photography. He was both heir and dissenter. In this sense, McCulloh's practice belongs to a lineage of artists who reimagined the West far less heroically. Like Ed Ruscha, Robert Adams, and Lewis Baltz, he saw the built environment as a contested and wrought landscape. But unlike the detached ironists of the New Topographics, McCulloh entered the frame.
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