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The most joyous years I’ve spent as a writer were in the company of photographer Douglas McCulloh, who died in January, a week after being diagnosed with cancer. McCulloh and I worked on books and essays about Southern California, and the joy was in long days spent driving countless miles looking for whatever surprises came our way — landscapes and people, the untold stories of Southern California.
Doug always told me, “I’m an atheist, but you always pray we’ll find a great story, and your way seems to be working.”
We drove down Agua Mansa Road in San Bernardino to photograph the grave of Antonio Trujillo — who once saved the life of Benjamin Wilson, later the mayor of Los Angeles — and found the headstones backdropped by warehouses and industry. We watched a young Peruvian shepherd safeguard ewes and lambs in Nuevo with the help of a huge white Alsatian sheephound who rose from the middle of his disguise in the flock to threaten coyotes.
We spent days in the Coachella Valley, investigating its startling beauty and equally startling income inequity — at the Empire Polo grounds, at worker camps, in the fields where men and women bend to pick the food we eat and showed us, with pride, what it takes to grow watermelon: placing a clear plastic cup over every baby plant in row after row.
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1. A springtime watermelon harvest in the Coachella Valley. 2. Writer Susan Straight and a historic chapel near Oasis, Calif. 3. A Coachella farm field and the Santa Rosa Mountains. 4. Election night 2012, when Jose Medina became the first Latino from Riverside elected to the state Assembly. (Douglas McCulloh photos)
As curator and interim director of UC Riverside’s California Museum of Photography, McCulloh expanded on the themes of Southern California and beyond in dozens of shows — the prescient “Facing Fire”; the groundbreaking “Sight Unseen,” featuring the work of blind photographers; and “The Great Picture,” the single largest printed photograph in history, made with five other photographers at a former military airplane hangar in Orange County.
His own images are in numerous collections big (LACMA, the Huntington, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) and intimate. The Medina family, proprietors of Riverside’s iconic Zacateca Cafe, keep his pictures of their original restaurant on display in their new space. Jose Medina, the first Latino elected to the Assembly from Riverside, decorated his office in Sacramento with a McCulloh election night photo.
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1. The Zacatecas Cafe has been a community gathering spot in Riverside since 1963. 2. A driveway gathering on Michael Street in Riverside’s Eastside neighborhood. 3. Vicky Medina, who married into the Zacatecas Cafe, and relatives, 2012. (Douglas McCulloh photos)
I keep his brilliant book “Chance Encounters: The L.A. Project,” published in 1998, next to me on my desk as I write. It’s the culmination of six years spent documenting people and their stories found in precise quarter-mile square locations chosen randomly from a grid map of Los Angeles County. Each photo and text comprise a narrative, beautifully put together, about a place that could only exist in Southern California. In each image I see his boundless curiosity, his gift for putting his subjects at ease, his eye for what defines my world, our world, in a way we shouldn’t forget.
Susan Straight’s forthcoming novel is “Sacrament.” Douglas McCulloh’s final curated show, “Lost in the Wilderness: Ansel Adams in the 1960s,” opens Saturday at the California Museum of Photography.
