On The Beach

Photographing people on beaches is an aggression. McCulloh and collaborator Jacques Garnier spent years photographing people on California and Florida beaches. They pick a spot on the sand and set up unforgiving studio lights and a high-resolution camera. Then they let people pose before the lens. In truth, they are setting a trap.

"Beaches are half display, half voyeurism," stated the Southeast Museum of Photography about the project. "This is the precise terrain of photography - one side posing, the other looking. Cameras belong on the beach."

The photographers set up studio lighting at crowded beaches and "sample the passing parade like scientists who periodically dip water out of a flowing stream." The resulting photographs are "infinitely less guarded than posed portraits," states arts writer Laura Stewart. "They tell vivid stories about the beach and its people, and about those of us who are given the unusual freedom to stare."

The Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida originated an exhibition and book on the project. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art purchased a portfolio for their permanent collection. The work has been shown at museums, among them Laguna Art Museum; Autry National Center of the American West, Los Angeles; Southeast Museum of Photography; California Museum of Photography; and Lancaster Museum of Art and History.

"Garnier and McCulloh's odd beach populace are more akin to those found in Diane Arbus's New York City or August Sander's Germany who, each in their own way, approached their native lands as unfamiliar ones... In the case of these artists, their portraits are not only documentaries, but allegories for their times." -Tyler Stallings, chief curator, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California