Until a cou­ple weeks ago I hadn’t bought any art or photo books this year. In today’s online age some­thing really has to speak to me for me to want to make space for it at home in tan­gi­ble, doorstop form. Chris McCaw’s new–and first–book, Sun­burn, was the release that broke this year’s book­less streak.

Sun­burn / Chris McCaw.
Rich­mond, VA: Can­dela, 2012.
Dimen­sions: 10 1/2 x 11 1/2 in.
96 pages, 43 plates
ISBN 978–0-9845739–2-9

From cover to cover this is a book of pho­tographs incor­po­rat­ing one main sub­ject: the sun. But this is the sun pho­tographed in a way that’s never been done before.

Chris uses giant lenses, many of them weigh­ing dozens of pounds, and aims them at a sheet of vin­tage photo paper inside big cam­eras of his own mak­ing. All that light gen­er­ates a lot of heat, and the paper inside the cam­era often scorches the areas where the sun’s image falls on it. Most of the expo­sures are many min­utes to many hours long, so that as the sun moves through the sky it burns lines and arcs onto the paper in the cam­era. Some­times lit­tle fires break. Photo paper isn’t used to all this light, and in addi­tion to flam­ing out every now and then it can do some wacky things with a process called solar­iza­tion, where some parts of the image are flipped from neg­a­tive to pos­i­tive. In a few of the images you can also see some rich col­ors oth­ers than black or white or gray in the dan­ger zone around the sun’s image, a reac­tion of the paper’s chem­istry to being used in ways it wasn’t designed to be used. (The book’s cover image above demon­strates this nicely.)

The method of work­ing would remain an inter­est­ing anec­dote if it didn’t result in some pretty star­tling pho­tographs. Be sure to click and enlarge these images to begin to see all their beau­ti­ful lit­tle sub­tleties. You’ll be glad you did.

Chris McCaw. Sun­burned GSP#65 (Nevada), 2007. 16“x20” unique gelatin sil­ver paper neg­a­tive. Pri­vate collection.

This early piece shows the clas­sic burn-through with the sun’s path.

Chris McCaw. Sun­burned GSP#190, 2008. 20“x24” unique gelatin sil­ver paper neg­a­tive. Fidelity Invest­ments Collection.

In this and the next image the sun didn’t scorch through the paper, but it did some cool things with the branches in the foreground.

Chris McCaw. Sun­burned GSP#325, 2009. 4“x5” unique gelatin sil­ver paper neg­a­tive. Pri­vate collection.

Some pho­tog­ra­phy con­cerns itself with the world out­side the cam­era. It’s pho­tog­ra­phy about peo­ple, places, issues and ideas. Other kinds of pho­tog­ra­phy do a lot of navel-gazing obsess­ing about the process of pho­tog­ra­phy itself. This sec­ond camp expresses itself in lots of dif­fer­ent ways, includ­ing images pro­duced using antique pho­to­graphic processes, toy cam­eras, camera-less pho­tograms, or images cre­ated by the chem­i­cal reac­tion of the entrails of bun­nies with color pho­to­graphic paper. (No, I’m not mak­ing this up. The pho­tog­ra­pher Adam Fuss has a body of work that appar­ently ended up with his fam­ily and friends eat­ing many meals that fea­tured rab­bit as the main course.) I think Chris’s work falls a lit­tle more on the camera-geek side of the equa­tion, and his work is instantly appeal­ing to pho­tog­ra­phers famil­iar with the mate­ri­als he works with. But the result­ing pho­tos of land­scape with a sun’s path burned out of the sky, with mys­te­ri­ous flips of pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive, dark and light, are pretty won­der­ful things that view­ers attuned to beau­ti­ful objects will imme­di­ately con­nect with.

Chris McCaw. Sun­burned GSP#541(Galápagos), 2012. 8“x10” unique gelatin sil­ver paper negative.

The sun’s path changes with the sea­sons and with your loca­tion on the earth. If you want to have your sun rise up the cen­ter of the photo in a per­fectly straight line you have to do some trav­el­ing to the earth’s equa­tor, which is exactly what Chris did, tak­ing this photo off the coast of the Galá­pa­gos Islands ear­lier this year. Wow, huh? The sun’s reflec­tion really makes this image.

And there’s a sort of com­pan­ion piece to this one, a big multi-panel panorama he shot up in Alaska’s Brooks Range, where the sun never sets as it marks a long, slow parabola over the moun­tains on the hori­zon over the course of more than a day. Dou­ble wow. (It’s on pages 68–69 of his book.)

And did I men­tion Chris is a really cool guy? A few years back I was on a lit­tle desert camp­ing trip to Anza Bor­rego with four other pho­tog­ra­phers, and Chris was one of them. At that point he’d fig­ured out that there was some­thing really inter­est­ing when you burn a pho­to­graphic neg­a­tive, but hadn’t yet worked out his cur­rent method that uses big sheets of pho­to­graphic paper that serve as the final art­work, scorch marks and all. To think, I knew the Chris way back when before impend­ing greatness.

So…if you have a big, rec­tan­gu­lar stock­ing to fill later this month, this might be the per­fect thing to put in it!

Oh, and I for­got to men­tion this impres­sive fron­tispiece to the book. The image is Sun­burned GSP#573(eclipse), 2012. Cool enough, but the page has been die-cut to give you a sense of how it would be to han­dle one of these pho­tos. I didn’t shoot the back of the page, but there you’ll find repro­duced the back­side of the image with scorch marks and Chris’s nota­tions. It’s for things like this that the word-elves invented the word “awesome.”

All images in this post are copy­right the artist, and are used here with his permission.