Chris McCaw and Rachel Phillips

Friday, September 18th, 2015 7:30 PM PST
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94133

This event is presented in partnership with the San Francisco Art Institute

About Chris McCaw:

At age thirteen, Chris McCaw’s mom forced him to take a photo course at the community center.  He was hooked.  Concurrently, McCaw spent his youth in the punk and skateboarding scenes, taking the “DIY” motto of those cultures and applying it to photography.   The first camera he built in 1995 was a 7x17” view camera to make contact negatives for platinum prints. Over the ensuing decades—and particularly with his Sunburn project—McCaw has used photographic materials, especially expired gelatin silver paper, in groundbreaking ways.  His work is held in numerous public collections, and in 2012 a monograph Sunburn was published by Candela Books.

“Chris has been getting his hands wet in the darkroom from the age of 13, and since then he has been unable separate his personal life from his photographic life. In a constant state of production of photographic work from that early age, he continues to be excited about the medium.  The early years involved self taught explorations in skateboarding/ zine /punk scenes with a fisheye lens and Tri-X through the mid-late 80’s. After high school he learned everything he could about photography. Finally he fell in love with the simplicity of large format cameras, and in 1992 got his first 4”x5”. The following year he fell in love with the platinum/palladium printing process and even larger cameras. To this day Chris makes his living through the platinum/palladium process. Currently he’s working the boundaries of analogue photographic mediums with his project titled Sunburn."

More about Chris McCaw:

Born 1971, Daly City, California, USA
Lives and works in Pacifica, CA

Education
1995 BFA, photography, Academy of Art, San Francisco, CA.
1990 De Anza College, Cupertino, CA.  Studies-photographic arts, film production

About Rachel Phillips:

Rachel Phillips is a hunter-gatherer, sifting through dusty piles of ephemera in a tantalizing search for long-forgotten yet still visually potent objects she can resurrect through her work.  She often employs an unusual transfer-printing technique, physically adding new imagery to artifacts ranging from late 19th century cabinet card photographs to Depression era envelopes.