Chris McCaw: Double Day
at SF Camerawork

Haines Gallery and SF Camerawork are pleased to collaborate on a solo exhibition featuring major works by celebrated Bay Area photographer Chris McCaw, who uses hand-built cameras and age-old photographic processes while continuially expanding the medium's possibilities.

Chris McCaw’s inventive process transforms photography’s essential components—light, time, and photosensitive materials—into physical records of duration and exposure, highlighting our place with a cosmos in motion. In his iconic Sunburn series, the lenses of his hand-built cameras function as magnifying glasses, allowing the sun to literally burn its path directly into light-sensitive paper. At the heart of Chris McCaw: Double Day is Sunburned GSP #860 (Double midnight, Galbraith Lake, Arctic Circle, Alaska), 2015, the largest continuous Sunburn McCaw has realized to date. Created during the Arctic summer, this monumental 25-panel work traces the sun’s trajectory across the sky over the course of approximately thirty hours, capturing twice the phenomenon of the “midnight sun” near the Arctic Circle. Measuring more than 25 feet in length and comprising just as many panels of silver gelatin paper, the work is a breathtaking record of landscape and weather, labor, and the passage of time. Though widely recognized as one of the artist’s most significant achievements, the work has never before been exhibited on the West Coast. Alongside Sunburned GSP #860, the exhibition will feature additional works that illuminate McCaw’s evolving investigations into the material limits and possibilities of photography itself.