The world’s largest photograph taken by the largest camera happened in Irvine. And starting this weekend, the Great Park will expose visitors to what went into creating the 31-by-111-foot image.
The Great Park Artists Studios will open the new exhibit, “The Great Picture: Making the World’s Largest Photograph,” on Sunday, Feb. 19.
“The Great Picture,” was created in Irvine by six photographers with The Legacy Project: Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh and Clayton Spada. It depicts a panoramic view of a portion of the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, now the Irvine Great Park.
Garnier, The Legacy Project’s president, said the photographers first decided “this 4,800-acre facility needed to be documented before it was torn down” beginning a process of capturing images of every single building on the base.
The El Toro station, once the largest lima bean field in North America, was converted into the largest Marine Corps air station on the West Coast in the early 1940s, serving as a training ground and departure point for units headed for combat in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. In 2001, the city began to convert the airbase into the Great Park.
For the photographers, documenting the El Toro station “was like being a kid in a candy store” because “you just don’t get these kinds of opportunities very often,” Garnier said, “to have access to something this grand.”
Their goal was to have the photographs be publicly available, and five years ago they turned over about 500,000 of the images to UC Irvine. The university is currently sorting through the images, Garnier said, so that “one day all of what we have done will be available to the public, to architects, to the visionaries that want to look at it.”
“The Great Picture,” which features empty runways with the station’s control tower looming in the background, came about when Spada wanted to bring to…
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