The Great Picture holds the Guinness World Record for the largest print photograph ever taken (111 feet wide and 32 feet high), and the camera with which it was taken holds the record for being the world’s largest. The photograph was taken in 2006 as part of the Legacy Project, a photographic record of the history of Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in California.
The single photograph was created in 2006 by a group of six artists—Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh, and Clayton Spada—along with hundreds of volunteers.
They transformed an abandoned F/A-18 fighter jet hangar into a gigantic pinhole camera by darkening and sealing the interior from outside light. A pinhole, just under a quarter-inch in diameter (0.635 cm) was centered between the metal hangar doors to serve as the camera’s aperture.
The hangar-turned-camera recorded a panoramic image of what was on the other side of the door using the centuries-old principle of “camera obscura” or pinhole camera. An image of the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station with the San Joaquin Hills in the background, appeared upside down and flipped left to right on film after being projected through the tiny hole in the hangar’s metal door.
The opaque negative image print was developed by 80 volunteers during five hours in a vinyl pool liner custom tray, the size of an Olympic swimming pool, with 600 US gallons (2,300 l) of traditional developer and 1,200 US gallons (4,500 l) of fixer pumped into the tray using high volume pumps.
