It’s not uncommon to find oneself strangely fascinated by the marks and blisters left by sunburns. The photographs of the American Chris McCaw are like these small wounds we compulsively touch and puncture. In his latest series, McCaw, a disciple of ancient forms of photography, substituted paper for skin and submits it to the same kinds of burns. For this experiment, McCaw developed his own technique using large format cameras and powerful lenses generally used for military surveillance and aerial reconnaissance. Instead of a negative, McCaw exposes a fiber-based gelatin paper to sunlight from periods of 15 minutes to 24 hours.
These long exposures cook the gelatin, literally burning the paper’s surface, which magnifies the sun’s rays and reveals markings that show the trajectory of the earth around the sun. Through this process, McCaw is trying to give his photographs particular tones of orange, red, metal and ash, a natural reversal of tonality, creating a positive image on a negative. It is a work of both creation and destruction, of a piece with the photographs of Henry Fox Talbot, another artist who worked with paper negatives.
In order to capture vast geographical spaces, McCaw traveled to wild and remote areas like the Galapagos Islands, the Sierras, and the Arctic Circle, where he was able capture the different trajectories of the sun and a few extraordinary events: eclipses, spring and autumn equinoxes, and midnight suns. These mosaics take the viewer to a dark and supernatural world as they question man’s place in the universe: “This project has transformed the way I think about photography and the world,” says McCaw. “During all this I have become attuned to the reality that we’re all running around on a spinning marble orbiting a fiery ball.”
Jonas Cuénin
Chris McCaw, Marking Time
From November 29th 2012 to January 19th 2013
Yossi Milo Gallery
245 10th Avenue
New York, NY 10001
USA
T : +1 (212) 414-0370
