Поэзия внутрилинзовых бликов и истинная соляризация. Скорее, это для «Легенд» топик, так что там закладочку сделаю.
Sunburns
Chris McCaw
Duncan Miller Gallery
USA. Los Angeles, 10 Apr-24 May 2008
SUNBURNED GSP#168
SUNBURNED GSP#187
SUNBURNED GSP#202
http://www.duncanmillergallery.com/chrismccaw.html
Chris McCaw is a fine-art photographer who shoots with large-format cameras (8 x 10, 16 x 20, or 20 x 24 inch), which he builds himself. Sunburns, as the series is titled, are unique images made as McCaw's camera lenses capture and intensify the sun's rays, which often burn a path across the paper.
McCaw explains: "When the conditions are right, the burning goes all the way through the paper base. The subject of the photograph reverses through solarization, and the unique paper negative becomes a one-of-a-kind paper positive . . . not only is the resulting image a representation of the subject photographed, but the subject, the sun, is an active participant in the printmaking . . . both creating and destroying the resulting photograph."
The images-subtle, elegant, and even slightly ominous-invite close scrutiny. The minimalist skylines or horizons, where visible, evoke the transitory nature of the elements in the locales where McCaw chooses to photograph: the desert, the sea, or the mountains.
Chris McCaw was born in the San Francisco Bay area in 1971 and has worked obsessively in the darkroom since the age of thirteen. Although initially self-taught-he spent his teenage years photographing the punk/skateboarding scene-McCaw later received a BFA from the Academy of Art College in 1995.
http://www.duncanmillergallery.com/mccaw/mccaw-bio.html
Вот тут имеется довольно подробное описание процесса:
Chris McCaw's 'Sunburns' illuminates with astonishing camera tricks
By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times
Photography, literally defined, means writing with light, and light packs heat. Together, the twinned energy sources fuel Chris McCaw's astonishingly beautiful body of work, "Sunburns," at Duncan Miller.
The process McCaw devised to create the work is captivating. Each picture is a unique print, made in a large-format camera that the Bay Area-artist built himself using old, scavenged lenses. McCaw sets up his cameras in the desert or near the sea, aimed with the sun fully within the frame. He places photographic paper where film belongs, inside the camera's film holder. Exposures can last up to four hours. They produce an image that is a negative but that appears to be positive because the lengthy exposure time and the idiosyncratic behavior of the expired photographic paper cause a reversal of values akin to the effect of solarization.
Further, the lens concentrates the sun's rays. Remember the old scouting method of starting a fire by using a magnifying glass? Over time, those focused rays burn into the photographic paper. In some of the images, the sun appears as a singed black dot. In other, longer exposures, the arc of the sun's rising or setting has slashed all the way through the paper, leaving a scarred absence outlined in scorched black.
McCaw's favorite part of the process, he states on his website, "is watching smoke come out of the camera during the exposure."
It's hard to pick favorites among the results. The images mesmerize in different ways. Some show just sea and sky as barely differentiated bands of gray, the water shimmering with light reflected from a paradoxically dark sun. For some pictures, McCaw opens and closes the shutter several times, so the sun repeats as it rises, forming a string of coded dots, ascending notes on a scale.
McCaw uses a variety of photographic papers in different sizes, and they yield a rich range of tonalities and temperatures. One image looks as if it were drawn in metallic dust; another, in graphite or charcoal. Another, anomalous in this group, has the creamy sepia tones of the 19th century. The process reduces subjects -- Joshua trees, palms, sea cliffs and mountain ranges -- to silhouettes, giving McCaw's daytime photographs the moody, elusive quality of Whistler nocturnes.
Several pictures read as pure gesture: the slash of the sun's trail across a scale-less expanse, the fall of a luminous, silvery comet. Lucio Fontana's "Spatial Concept" paintings, their surfaces violated by punctures and slicing stabs, come to mind, as do Joe Goode's "Environmental Impact" canvases, pierced by shotgun blasts. McCaw's work too entails violation, but not violence, and the interruptions of the surface are inflicted not by the human hand but by natural (and chemical) processes, harnessed. The work feels more reverential than defiant, a homage to the creative/destructive powers of nature and the wholly explicable mysteries of the photographic process.…
На сайте автора:
Sunburns — New experiments in starting fires in my camera.
Personal Portfolio — On going personal project involving my life, nostalgia, and my homemade 7"x17" view camera.
the digital platinotype — Platinum/palladium printing service using digitally enlarged negatives from your originals.
http://www.chrismccaw.com/
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