Chris McCaw

Returning to the roots of photography, Chris McCaw builds his own large-format cameras, trains his lens on his family, land, sky, and sea, and produces unique, direct contact prints. Working in series, he has documented his grandparents’ farm and his family’s travels. With their rich gradation of black-and-white tones and their vintage appearance, these images feel nostalgic. McCaw’s “Sunburned” series (begun 2006), which he describes as “a project taking photography back to its primal beginnings,” is his most elemental and experimental. Inspired by William Henry Fox Talbot’s conception of the sun as a pencil, with which nature etches images of itself, McCaw loads his cameras with gelatin silver photographic paper, which he exposes to the sun for varying lengths of time. The resulting prints bear the sun’s markings—etched scratches and holes, traces of its path across the sky.