Chris McCaw

Chris McCaw’s artistic practice is firmly rooted in the history of photography while pushing the medium in new directions. Utilizing hand-built cameras, McCaw’s inventive process takes photography’s essential components — light and time, lenses and light-sensitive materials — to generate startlingly inventive photographic forms. His elegant, highly crafted images speak to a mastery of complex, analog photographic processes, revealing landscapes shaped at once by geography, astronomy, and his own experimental rigor. 

In McCaw’s iconic Sunburn and related series, the lenses of his handmade cameras function as magnifying glasses, allowing the sun to literally burn its path across the light-sensitive paper that is often solarized in the process — a natural reversal of tonality that occurs through overexposure. The subject of the photograph (the sun) disrupts the idea that a photograph is simply a representation of reality, instead becoming a physical embodiment of the Earth’s movement and the passage of time. McCaw’s latest body of work, Inverse, expands upon the analog tools he has evolved over the past two decades. These tonally bifurcated landscapes, created entirely within his large format cameras using custom-cut dark slides and varied exposure times, explore how the photographic negative and positive can serve as visual metaphors for how we see the landscape and navigate its changing manifestations.

McCaw’s work has recently been exhibited at the Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea (2025); de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (2023); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2020); and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2018); and is collected by distinguished institutions as George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Library of Congress, Washington DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among many others. He is the recipient of awards including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2026); Andy Warhol Foundation’s New Works Grant (2008); and Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant (2007), as well as the Emerging Icon in Photography Award from the George Eastman Museum (2014). 

His work has been the subject of two monographic publications: Sunburn (Candela Books, 2012) and Marking Time (Datz Press, 2023).