INVERSE
Chris McCaw’s Inverse series expands upon the analog tools he has evolved over the past two decades. To produce these new works, the artist deploys a technique called solarization, a tonal reversal between negative and positive that occurs through extreme, in-camera overexposure. Using multiple exposures and custom-cut dark slides that mask parts of the frame, McCaw trains the lenses of his hand-built cameras not on the sun but on Earth’s terrain, exploring how the photographic negative and positive can serve as visual metaphors for how we see the landscape and navigate its changing manifestations.
In some of these resulting new works, the positive area is framed within a central oculus, as if training our eyes on the site with a pair of binoculars or a camera’s viewfinder as the borders recede into a negative, latent state. In others, the landscape strobes with alternating passages of positive and negative tones, rendering otherworldly horizons with meticulous detail. By integrating the negative (normally considered as a means to an end) into the finished piece, McCaw disrupts our visual and emotional expectations, inviting a closer look at changing environments we might otherwise dismiss as familiar or easily understood.
Inverse offers a profound meditation on analog photography’s foundational elements and its continued capacity for reinvention. Across both bodies of work, McCaw pushes the medium beyond conventions, revealing landscapes shaped not only by geography, but by the artist’s own experimental rigor.
