Elemental

John Chiara (b. 1971, lives and works in San Francisco, CA) describes his process as “part photography, part sculpture, and part event,” printing directly onto photographic paper with his hand-built, large-format cameras. The resulting works of art retain the visible vestiges of their creation — uneven hand-cut edges, tape marks, light leaks, subtle streaking — inviting us to contemplate their content while pointing to the chemical aspects of their making.

In Chiara latest works, latest triple-exposure prints photographed at wooded locations in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and nearby Yerba Buena Island, elements of the landscape emerge and recede from these complex, layered compositions. Dense with plantlife, these images imagine how it may have felt to have experienced the land before it was inhabited. Elemental also includes black-and-white images of the Swiss Alps, created during an extended artist residency in 2020. While these new photographs are undeniably about a particular location, they speak more broadly to the ways we experience what the artist describes as “the blended character of memory in relation to specific moments or places.”

For over a decade, Binh Danh (b. 1977, lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA) has traveled across the American West, making daguerreotypes of scenic vistas on silver plates in a mobile darkroom he calls Louis, after Louis Daguerre. His images of Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and other US National Parks demonstrate his command of an exacting nineteenth-century process, capturing stunningly intricate yet ethereal images of these iconic landmarks.

In 2014, Danh created a series of daguerreotypes focusing on the San Francisco cityscape, rendering landmarks, sites of civic engagement, and familiar street scenes all with the exquisite detail that only his chosen medium can capture. The works bring together his photographic practice and lived experience, as he revisits many sites from his formative years and bears witness to the city during a time of significant transformation.

Chris McCaw’s (b. 1971, lives and works in Pacifica, CA) elegantly composed landscapes result from a careful choreography between artist and nature. The powerful lenses within his hand-built cameras act as magnifying glasses, allowing the sun to literally burn its path across light-sensitive paper over long exposures in locations ranging from the Mojave Desert to the Arctic Circle. His work disrupts the idea that a photograph is simply a representation of reality, instead becoming a physical record of planetary movement and the passage of time.

In his ambitious Cirkut #4 (2015), taken at Alaska’s Dietrich River, McCaw used a modified 1913 Cirkut camera — a rotating camera that, mounted on a tripod, captured the earliest panoramic images — and a 10-foot long scroll of vintage silver-based paper, to capture multiple sunsets and sunrises in a single, continuous exposure over 48 hours. The irregularity of earth’s orbit around the sun required the artist to manually adjust the speed of his camera’s rotation every 15 minutes — a constant dialogue between careful planning, calibration, and an element of chance. 

Nature is likewise both subject and collaborator in a selection of new cyanotypes by Meghann Riepenhoff (b. 1979, lives and works in Bainbridge Island, WA). Placing paper coated in homemade emulsion directly within the landscape, she invites the elements to physically inscribe themselves onto her materials. 

A photographic record of the changing states of water, Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes point to the impermanence and the sublime in nature — and to the impact of human intervention and industrial practices on the environment. The artist’s Waters of the Americas series addresses this directly. The works were created near the site of the Eastman Kodak production facility, a source of monumental chemical contamination in its surrounding waters, and are named for the area’s EPA ID, identification numbers associated with sites impacted by hazardous waste.

The works in Elemental are singular and unique photographic objects, defined as much by how they are made as by what they depict, using analog methods that explore the medium’s fundamental materials of chemistry and light.

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Installation views of Elemental at Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA; photos: Robert Divers Herrick