The Great Photo

The Guinness Book of World records has announced a gigantic photo taken from an airport hangar turned camera obscura at Irvine's Great Park, the former Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, is the largest in the world!

According to a release from the Great Park's marketing people, “The Great Picture was created over the nine months leading up to July 2006 by six well-known photographic artists collectively known as the Legacy Project, aided by 400 volunteers, artists and experts. Working in their jet-hangar-transformed-into-camera, the group hand-applied 80 liters of gelatin silver halide emulsion to a seamless 3,375-square-foot canvas substrate custom-made in Germany. Development was done in a custom Olympic pool-sized developing tray using 10 high-volume submersible pumps and 1,800 gallons of black-and-white chemistry. The premiere exhibition at Art Center College of Design, South Campus, will feature The Great Picture along with videos and photographs in an environment designed to re-create the dramatic atmosphere within the jet-hangar-as-camera where the giant photograph was made.

"The photograph shows the control tower, structures and runways at the heart of the shuttered 4,700-acre Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in Southern California, shut down in the base closings of the mid-1990s. Once home to U.S. Marine Corps air operations for the western United States and Pacific region (including Japan, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East), El Toro is now being turned into housing and one of the largest urban parks in the western United States."

See The Great Picture at Art Center College of Design, South Campus Wind Tunnel, Pasadena, California. The showing runs Sept. 6 to Sept. 29.