Chris McCaw

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Chris McCaw (b. 1971; Daly City, CA) is a photo-based artist who focuses on distilling the intrinsic relationship between photography and the sun. The artist has long been fascinated with photography in all its iterations and has explored the medium since his youth, documenting California’s skateboarding, zine, and punk scenes in the mid-1980s. While pursuing his BFA, McCaw fell in love with large-format photography, experimenting vigorously with various printing processes and building his own cameras.

In the artist’s new series Inverse, begun in 2022, McCaw centers solarization as the main compositional and technical driver in the creation of each work. Through his years creating Sunburn, McCaw discovered instances in which a solarized image contained both negative and positive components on the same piece of paper. Driven to refine his use of solarization, the artist continued innovating his approach to find the full capabilities of this technique.

Combining double exposures and custom-cut dark slides, McCaw creates each Inverse work entirely within large-format cameras through arrested and complete solarization. On a trip to create work near Mono Lake in the high desert east of California’s Yosemite National Park, the artist staged a new experiment. Using a dark slide to cover part of the light-sensitive paper inside his camera, McCaw divided the print into two halves with greatly differing exposure times. One half was completely solarized, and appeared positive, while the other remained inverted, negative.

Inverse allows McCaw a newfound freedom in composition, as solarization can be achieved without aiming the camera directly at the sun. In this body of work, the artist gravitates to the simple forms of the landscape as a backdrop for photographic experimentation. McCaw frequently returns to a particular area of the Mojave Desert as a setting that makes the most of this approach. Dotted with massive granite boulders and backed by layered mountain ranges, the rugged forms of the desert map the instant switches from positive to negative onto monumental shapes. Inverse works range in scope, including single sheets and multi-element panoramas, rendering landscapes that weave in and out of day and night, familiar and unfamiliar.

Inverse seeks to unearth the latent negative implicit within every photograph, giving it an expressive power of its own within the finished work and employing repeated reversals to create a harmonious tension. The singular images serve as a split view of two spectrums of light, while the multiple negative works form a visual puzzle that the viewer must piece back together. While the majority of photographic prints are positive, the negative has been the silent collaborator in the analog process since photography’s nineteenth-century origins. In this series, the artist hones the potential of opposing tonalities to coexist within a single frame, amplifying the contrast between these two states and upending what is expected of photographic materials yet again.

"In these elegantly distilled landscapes, the sun’s course is reduced to dot and line, but what McCaw ultimately chronicles is not the sun’s motion but our own, the earth’s rotation, the shifting view from our shifting station. The work speaks to our physical reality with graphic potency and a deep sense of awe. Charred, flaky edges where the sun has bitten through register in the body, as do the elemental tones of oxidized metal, ash, and smoke. Like both Colville and Brandt, McCaw harnesses destruction as a tool of creation. Smoke wafts from his cameras as he works, and the burning emulsion emits a toasty smell."

                                                              - Leah Ollman