“I love the simplicity. It has caused me to rethink photography just working with silhouettes,” said photographer Chris McCaw during the lecture he gave as part of the De Anza Photography lecture series. McCaw showed one of kind images from his Sunburn project and explained how the images were made on March 7.

Chris McCaw is a De Anza alumnus. He discovered photography as a teenager and taught himself how to take images of his friends skateboarding and the punk rock music scene.  McCaw attended De Anza from 1990-93 and praised De Anza’s photography department. He tells friends “I learned everything I needed to know at De Anza.” 

After De Anza he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography from the San Francisco Academy of Arts in 1995. Among the galleries that have shown McCaw’s work are the Stephen Wirtz Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Phoenix Art Museum.

McCaw started with his early work. In college McCaw and his friends would go on photographic safaris throughout the southwest taking pictures. He spent a lot of time making infrared images. The infrared images he showed had a ghostly, other-worldly quality to them.

The heart of McCaw’s lecture is the images he has created for the Sunburn project. McCaw started making the images by accident. In 2003 he was making large format images for direct contact printing. He set his camera up to capture the movement of stars. He planned on closing the aperture before sunrise but overslept. All he thought he had was a ruined piece of film. But like photographers everywhere he developed the film and discovered the sun had solarized the negative and burned a path of its movement into the image. Solarization causes the negative to become positive; when printed the image comes out as a negative.

Intrigued, McCaw experimented for several years with the burned images. He started using old photographic paper and exposed it to direct sunlight to capture one of a kind images.  McCaw wanted to make the sun bigger so he used telephoto lenses. Through research he found lenses used in aerial reconnaissance had the correct aperture for his work. The reconnaissance lens focuses the sun and causes paper to burn vigorously.

McCaw uses large format cameras with bellows that can extend to five feet. The do-it-yourself spirit from his youth serves him well. You cannot buy a 17×24 camera off the shelf so he makes them himself. And among the features a regular camera doesn’t have is brakes and method for letting oxygen in the bellows.

McCaw thinks nothing of spending all day at the shore to capture an image. With long exposures you also capture the changing of the weather in the image. McCaw said you have to take into account the weather might not cooperate and you could spend three weeks in Alaska waiting for a clear day. 

The focusing of the sun causes the paper to burn while it is exposed. The burn path created is an integral part of the image. The burning of the gelatin in the paper imparts frequently leaves orange burn marks in the paper. 

McCaw uses a wide variety of photographic paper in making his images. Each paper reacts differently when exposed to the sun, helping to create a unique image. He is always on the hunt for old photographic paper and constantly experiments to see what it will do. McCaw likes the hands-on feeling in making his images, “It’s something you can’t do in digital,” he said. 

McCaw concluded the lecture with images of the midnight sun he took on the Alaska North Slope in 2011. The final image was a 360-degree image of the midnight sun over 24 hours. After the lecture McCaw took questions from the audience. 

Late this month McCaw is going to the Galapagos Islands photograph the straight up and down path of sun on the Vernal Equinox March 21.