![]() She wanted the servicemembers who lived on the base decades ago to be relatable to the public today. “I looked for photographs that would allow the public to connect with the images,” Castenada said. Her passion for the subject led her to approaching Sabolick, the arts program coordinator at the Great Park’s Palm Court Arts Complex. The exhibit was initially Castenada’s thesis project when she was a graduate student at the university. “Life on Base: MCAS El Toro” is curated by Cynthia Castenada and Adam Sabolick with images from the MCAS Miramar Archives, Flying Leathernecks Museum and Cal State Fullerton’s The Lawrence de Graaf Center for Oral and Public History. agencies that have picked up a digital image of this piece,” Garnier said.Īlongside “The Great Picture: Making the World’s Largest Photograph” display in the Great Park Artist Studios, also opening this weekend is an exhibit showcasing what life was like on the base from the 1940s through the 1960s. “The next morning, there were about 100 U.S. What’s special about “The Great Picture,” Garnier said, is that it represents a meeting point: “It’s a point in photography where we moved from analog darkroom photography to digital photography.”Īfter the six photographers had exposed the giant photograph and processed it, they took some digital photos of it. It was then lifted out of the tank and washed using hoses from two nearby fire hydrants - and “finally a picture appeared,” Garnier said. To achieve the size of “The Great Picture,” the distance between the image they wanted to photograph and the pinhole camera was “around 50 to 75 yards,” Garnier said. Light passes through the small opening, projecting an inverted image on the opposite side. The technique, discovered by the Chinese in the 4th century B.C., used a camera obscura, also known as a pinhole camera.Ī pinhole camera is typically a light-proof box with a small opening on one of the sides in this instance, the hangar became the light-proof box. “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 the project an ancient image-making technique he was teaching graduate students. 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.” 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. In 2001, the city began to convert the airbase into the Great Park.įor 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.” 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. ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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