San Francisco-based John Chiara, who is represented at Paris Photo this month by the Atlanta-based gallery Jackson Fine Art, is another photographer whose innovative use of old technology is attracting attention. His prints are collected by major institutions, and the first monograph on his work was published in October. Chiara designs and builds his own huge cameras – the largest one is taller than a man – that he transports on a flatbed trailer in a kind of heroic emulation of the laborious endeavours of the earliest photographers. In a recent film he said, “My obsession has taken me to this point where I am literally inside the camera.” He chooses unusual viewpoints – not archetypal picturesque vistas but glimpses through trees (Eagle’s Nest, Clover Hill, Mississippi, $18,000), a flagpole, a corner of sky. His cameras work like daguerreotype box cameras, the images recorded onto oversized photosensitive paper through long exposures, with Chiara controlling with his hands, from inside, the way the light falls through the lens. Unexpected flashes of colour add to the lyricism and mystery of these large-scale images ($8,000 to $18,000) where, far more than the landscape itself, it is the drama of light’s encounter with photographic paper that is captured.
