A Hangar, A Pinhole And A World Record: Building The World's Biggest Camera

Sometime in June, a team of photographers in southern California plans to transform an abandoned airplane hangar into a giant pinhole camera, expose a huge piece of light-sensitive cloth, and create what may be the world's largest photograph. The project is difficult and expensive, and if it succeeds, the result will be a single black-and-white image of an empty runway.

So why do it?

To the six photographers involved, Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh and Clayton Spada, the undertaking is part of something bigger than just a really huge picture. Since 2002, they have been working on a long-term photographic study of Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in suburban Orange County. The air base was shuttered in 1999, and after years of community debate, is slated to be turned into a giant urban park. "It's a way to pay tribute to the base... and its role in what's happening in the county," says Burchfield, a professor and gallery director at Cypress College, a community college between El Toro and Los Angeles. The photographers call their work The Legacy Project, which they say will ultimately be a 15-year study of the air station. To date, they've taken more than 80,000 images and produced two books. The Great Picture, as the group calls it, will measure 25 feet by 100 feet. The hangar that will become their camera obscura is 160 feet long and 60 feet high, and the photographers will hang the cloth at a focal length of 80 feet from the pinhole, Burchfield says.

Incidentally, "pinhole" is an imprecise word; the hole will probably need to be a quarter-inch or more in diameter. Burchfield says the team is conducting experiments with different aperture sizes and exposure times. Most likely, the photo will need to be exposed for five to 12 days, Burchfield says, depending on the results of their experiments. Getting this far has required a lot of creative problem solving. The team had to choose a big hangar that could be made completely dark inside. They settled on Building 115, which faces a runway and control tower that are slated to be ripped up and turned into a landscaped section of the park. To make the hangar light tight, the photographers are contracting a pest exterminator to "tent" the inside of the building. Any leaks will be sealed with black plastic and tape. For the negative itself, no piece of photographic paper was big enough, so the photographers special-ordered a large piece of muslin fabric. Once the hangar is sealed, they plan to coat the cloth with a light-sensitive emulsion called Liquid Light from Rockland Colloid. Los Angeles photo store Freestyle Photographic Supplies is donating 20 gallons of the stuff, Burchfield says. Working under safelights, the photographers will paint on the Liquid Light with rollers and hang the muslin vertically from the ceiling.

Garnier, a photo artist and contract painter, helped figure out how best to roll on the emulsion. It has to be applied at 115 degrees, it must be spread evenly, it cannot come in contact with certain kinds of metal (ruling out the use of a paint sprayer) and it dries in about ten minutes, he says. Even with many of the supplies and services being donated, Burchfield says the project will cost at least $20,000. To fund it, the photographers are pre-selling prints of the image. They plan to shrink the negative by re-photographing it and printing it as a positive and a negative on 30-inch by 50-inch paper. Burchfield predicts the final, massive image will be sharp and have tremendous depth of field, as is the nature of a pinhole camera image. The photographers will unveil the photograph when it is complete, but it won't have a permanent home initially. Burchfield hopes one of the museums being built in the new park will have a place for it. The photographers are working with Guinness World Records to certify their accomplishment as the largest camera and largest photograph, two categories for which Guinness doesn't list any current record holders. Some cursory Internet research supports their shot at the record.

Numerous photographers, including Legacy Project member Spada, have experimented with large pinhole cameras in rooms or vehicles, but there's no evidence of anything this big. Back in 1900, one giant camera used glass plates of 4 1/2 feet by 8 feet, according to an article about camera maker George Lawrence. The Discovery Park science center in Arizona claims on its web site to have the world's largest camera obscura, but the image it only projects is only 5 feet by 12 feet. A University of Colorado at Boulder professor has proposed building a giant pinhole camera in space, which would probably be the largest camera anywhere, if it were ever built.