Beautifully conceived and produced, this oversize volume (a horizontal format: 14.75x9.75") documents an extraordinary project to produce the world's largest photograph, using the world's largest camera, a pinhole camera made from an airplane hangar. The resulting photo is roughly 107 feet wide and 31 feet high, created when the camera projected the image of the decommissioned air station El Toro (in Orange County, California) onto paper on a wall, with the emulsion then applied by hand. This Great Picture is just one component of a larger project called the Legacy Project, made up of a group of six world-class photographers, which has been undertaken to thoroughly document El Toro's transformation from an air base into a park. The history of the base, and the process, people, technique, and theory behind the project and the photo it produced are described in multiple chapters. An essay is included by renowned art critic Lucy Lippard. The execution of the volume itself is unusually fine and carefully conceived, with the type of some headings set upside down to mimic the reversed image of the camera obscura, a "pinhole" through the front cover, and a wealth of color photos of the project as well as concluding, fold-out plates of the finished photo in its positive and negative forms. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
