“Not only do I find myself using photographic materials in ways I hadn’t imagined, but I’ve also had to negotiate the physical realities of my subject as I never had to before. Having no control over the placement and movement of the sun, I have had to instead move myself and my equipment to specific locations, at specific times of the year, in order to capture the compositions I wanted.”
—Chris McCaw
Chris McCaw’s practice is fundamentally concerned with the collaborative role of the sun in relation to photographic image making. Employing a large-format camera and a lens typically used for military surveillance, McCaw exposes expired darkroom paper – rather than film – for an extended period of time. These long exposures result in unique, scorched, and solarized paper negatives. Fittingly, McCaw’s title for this series is Sunburned.
Informed by a contemporary perspective, McCaw’s photographs recall the medium’s earliest beginnings, specifically Niepce’s multiple-hour exposures and Henry Fox Talbot’s paper negatives, and are a distillation of photography’s primary ingredients, light and time.
