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Chris McCaw:
Reversals and RevolutionsJanuary 21 – March 7, 2026
For more than two decades, Chris McCaw has expanded the possibilities of analog photography, transforming the medium into an instrument for recording time, light, and planetary motion. Working with handbuilt cameras, discontinued papers, and exposures lasting from seconds to days, McCaw produces singular photographic objects that emerge entirely in-camera. These works are not manipulated, cropped, or digitally altered — they are direct physical records of light itself.
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Reversals and Revolutions debuts McCaw’s newest body of work, the Inverse series, alongside recent examples of his landmark Sunburn works, and new multi-panel and gridded compositions. Together, these works demonstrate the artist’s continued reinvention of analog photography, revealing its capacity for innovation in an era dominated by digital image-making.
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Chris McCaw
Inverse #123 (Lakes Basin), 202512 Unique paper negatives, partial in-camera solarization34 x 72.25 inches, framedSold
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Inverse: Dual States of Seeing
McCaw’s Inverse series represents a major evolution in his practice. Using precisely timed exposures and custom-cut dark slides, he allows portions of the photographic paper to undergo solarization — a tonal reversal caused by overexposure — while other areas remain unchanged. The resulting images contain both negative and positive tonalities within a single frame, presenting two opposing visual states simultaneously.
These divided landscapes make even familiar landscapes feel newly discovered. Mountains, forests, and deserts appear suspended between illumination and shadow, presence and absence. By incorporating the negative directly into the finished work, McCaw foregroundes the medium’s material foundations.
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A singular paper negative, Inverse #117 (Burnt, Anza Borrego) (above) captures a desert landscape shaped by fire and erosion, its opposing tonal states highlighted by a circular cutout that suggests an enormous desert moon rising behind a charred, wizened tree. The inversion occurs entirely in-camera, producing a subtle yet powerful transformation of the terrain, resulting in an intimate composition that emphasizes the precision of McCaw’s process.
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Composed of three contiguous negatives, Inverse #33, Mojave (above) expands the spatial and perceptual complexity of the series. Tonal reversals unfold across a wide horizon, transforming the Mojave Desert into a terrain of shifting perception, where opposing tonal states coexist within a unified visual field. The multi-panel structure reinforces photography’s temporal dimension. Each section represents a discrete exposure, yet together they form a single image assembled through duration as much as space.
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Chris McCaw
Sunburned GSP #1155 (Eastern Sierras), 20257 Unique gelatin silver paper negatives45 x 90.5 inches, framedSold
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Sunburn: Drawing with Light
In McCaw’s iconic Sunburn series, the sun itself becomes the primary mark-making agent. Using powerful lenses and extended exposures, he allows sunlight to inscribe itself onto photographic paper. The sun burns across the paper’s surface, the Earth’s rotation becomes visible as an arc, and the passage of time is embedded into each work’s structure. These luminous incisions are not symbolic representations, but physical traces of highly concentrated sunlight interacting with photographic material.
Many of the works in this exhibition expand upon this foundation through multi-panel and gridded compositions. Individual negatives are assembled into larger constellations, transforming sequential exposures into unified temporal fields. These structures emphasize photography’s capacity to record duration, making visible processes that unfold beyond ordinary perception. As the artist describes, these photographs are “a form of evidence, an embodiment of a material truth that transcends subject matter.”
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In Sunburned GSP #1128 (Mono Lake) (above), California's Mono Lake becomes a stage for the sun’s passage across the sky. The resulting arc cuts across the photographic surface with striking clarity, its trajectory determined by the Earth’s rotation and atmospheric conditions. The horizon anchors the image, while the solar burn transforms the photograph into a direct physical record of celestial motion. Each Sunburn work emerges through a careful balance of planning and unpredictability, making every composition irreducibly unique.
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Chris McCaw
Sunburned GSP #1156 (Strait of Juan de Fuca), 202512 Unique gelatin silver paper negatives39 x 144 inches$135,000
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Spanning twelve feet in width, the monumental Sunburned GSP #1156 (Strait of Juan de Fuca) (above) assembles twelve individual negatives into a single panoramic composition. The sun’s arc extends seamlessly across the entire structure, transforming the photograph into an immersive temporal field. The scale of the work reinforces its conceptual ambition. Rather than depicting a single moment, McCaw constructs an image that unfolds over time, allowing viewers to experience duration as a physical presence.
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Across all of these series, McCaw returns photography to its elemental foundations. His works are produced through prolonged engagement with natural forces — solar intensity, planetary rotation, atmospheric conditions — combined with rigorous technical experimentation. The resulting images resist easy categorization, existing simultaneously as photographs, objects, and physical records of time.In an era defined by digital manipulation and algorithmic image-making, McCaw’s practice asserts the continued relevance of analog photography as a material process. His works remind us that photography remains, at its core, a collaboration between light, matter, and time — an encounter between the physical world and the human impulse to understand it.
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