Special Projects

All Buildings

The fastidious United States Marine Corps numbered every building on the vast El Toro Base, over 1,800 structures in all. The equally obsessive Legacy Project collaborative matched the Marine Corps and raised it—systematically documenting every structure on the base.

Aerials

For more than a decade, the group has made periodic helicopter photo flights over the base. Like the overall Legacy Project itself, the aim is blend documentation with art, to zig-zag in the slippery zone between fact and fiction.

Timecourse

Photography can be time travel. For years, the Legacy Project has periodically walked a precise GPS-driven four-mile path through the heart of the base. Every thirty paces, the group shoots four simultaneous wide-angle images aimed to the front, back and sides. And with each circuit, the landscape changes in ways both subtle and dramatic. The work has been shown as fast-moving animated video on four flatscreens facing into a central viewing spot. The Timecourse thus presents a 360 degree view that hurtles both through space and time.

The Perimeter Project

In a mammoth single-day effort, photographic teams documented the entire 28-mile perimeter of the El Toro base. An outside-looking-in viewpoint was chosen to echo the public’s view of the military installation. Overlapping photographs depict every inch of the base boundary. The aim is to replicate the effort at the ten-year mark, overlaying linear travel with travel through time.