UCR ARTS Presents Dispatches: The Photography of Douglas McCulloh, 1990–2025
The first full survey of the Southern California photographer’s four-decade career is opening this fall at UCR ARTS in downtown Riverside.
In a new exhibition at UCR ARTS, California Museum of Photography, visitors can explore the extensive body of work by Southern California photographer Douglas McCulloh, spanning nearly four decades. The exhibition, titled Dispatches: The Photography of Douglas McCulloh, 1990–2025, will be on display from September 12 through December 20, 2026, in downtown Riverside.
McCulloh developed his conceptual photographic projects around building systems, carefully selecting camera points of view. Two key elements in his practice were maps and chance operations, which allowed him to encounter the visual world unfiltered. Two of his major series, Chance Encounters (1992–1999) and Lost Among the Stars (2003–2006), are featured in their entirety in this exhibition.
Chance Encounters involved meeting and speaking with people he encountered on 22,000 miles of chance-selected terrain, while Lost Among the Stars centered around 90 fixed points in Hollywood history.
Other series include Dream Street (1999–2009), which chronicled the creation and eventual collapse of a Southern California subdivision over a decade, and American Cross (2013–2025), his final ambitious undertaking. This project involved following a giant X drawn across the country, a journey that McCulloh began in January 2013 and completed on January 5, 2025, just over 400 miles short of its intended distance. Tragically, McCulloh passed away on January 5, 2025, after a brief illness.
Included in the exhibition is The Great Picture: Revisiting The Legacy Project (2006), which holds the Guinness World Record for the largest print photograph. McCulloh created this mammoth piece with five other artists inside a decommissioned Marine Corps hangar that had been converted into a functioning pinhole camera. While the final single gelatin silver print, measuring over 31 feet high and 111 feet wide, is not on display, the exhibition features behind-the-scenes documentation and a new virtual re-staging using game engine technology. This can be experienced in virtual reality or a screen-based first-person mode.
For those interested in learning more about the exhibition, they can visit ucrarts.ucr.edu for additional information.
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