Chris McCaw: Double Day — Co-presented by Haines Gallery @ SF Camerawork

SF Camerawork × Haines Gallery are pleased to present Chris McCaw: Double Day, a new solo exhibition by the celebrated Bay Area photographer. The first of two collaborative exhibitions presented in SF Camerawork’s gallery at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, the show centers on an ambitious, large-scale work that exemplifies the artist’s singular approach to image-making. 

SF Camerawork has played an important role early in McCaw's artistic development, providing support and visibility at pivotal moments in their careers. This exhibition honors that history while underscoring the organization’s lasting impact on photographers working in and around San Francisco for over fifty years.

Chris McCaw’s inventive process transforms photography’s essential components—light, time, and photosensitive materials—into physical records of duration and exposure, highlighting our place with a cosmos in motion. In hisiconic Sunburn series, the lenses of his hand-built cameras function as magnifying glasses, allowing the sun to literally burn its path directly into light-sensitive paper

At the heart of Chris McCaw: Double Day is Sunburned SP #860 (Double midnight, Galbraith Lake, Arctic Circle, Alaska), 2015, the largest continuous Sunburn McCaw has realized to date. Created during the Arctic summer, this monumental 25-panel work traces the sun's trajectory across the sky over the course of approximately thirty hours, capturing twice the phenomenon of the "midnight sun" near the Arctic Circle. Measuring more than 25 feet in length and comprising just as many panels of silver gelatin paper, the work is a breathtaking record of landscape and weather, labor, and the passage of time. Though widely recognized as one of the artist's most significant achievements, the work has never before been exhibited on the West Coast. Alongside Sunburned SP #860, the exhibition will feature additional works that illuminate McCaw's evolving investigations into the material limits and possibilities of photography itself.