The Legacy Project Collaborative is Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCullough and Clayton Spada. The six artists began working in 2002 at a giant, closed military base in Southern California – 4,800 acre Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. Granted extraordinary access to the sprawling base, the six artists have shaped the project of rare scope and significance projects include transforming a military jet hanger into the largest camera ever made to produce the world's largest photograph, To date, the group has taken over 450,000 photographs and produced an art-historical document on a scale seldom seen. Work from the collaborative project has been shown in more than 35 national and international exhibitions including the Smithsonian and the Chinese Academy of Fine Art in Beijing.
“A group obsession.” That's how noted critic and writer Lucy R. Lippard summarizes the Legacy Project – “marvelously extravagant,” “obsessively detailed,” producers of a “photographic sea.”
“For all its unprecedented size” states Lippard (the world's largest photograph) pales beside the ongoing documentation of Marine Corps Air Station El Toro undertaken by the photographic team - well over 450,000 photographs and counting. The artists set out to make as realistic a document as possible of the 15 year evolution of El Toro leaving few stones unturned. They systematically shot each of the more than 1,800 structures on the base: they made quarterly aerial shoots and did ‘walkabouts’ over the same five mile course with four cameras pointed in each of the cardinal directions, shooting every thirty paces.”
The Legacy photographers are unlocking (or providing a window on) the past and positioning it for the future. They have unfettered access to almost every nook and cranny of the air base and have entered into dialogues, both familiar and unpredictable, with all of it. Their images have overlays of irony, fetish, mysticism, and poetry.” Mark Johnstone, writer and curator.
(2003 - 2018)
