FULL SPECTRUM 2012 | AUCTION LOT 8

  •  

John Chiara
Campus Drive at Merritt #1, 2011
Dye destruction process
32 × 28 inches
Unique photograph
Courtesy of Haines Gallery

Retail value: $5,000 

In order to achieve his goals in photography, John Chiara built an extraordinary apparatus: a large, hand-built camera mounted on a flatbed trailer. It requires half the day to make a one-of-a-kind image and another half a day to develop it. Instead of creating a negative that he then enlarges onto photo paper, he shoots the image directly onto positive color photographic paper known as Ilfochrome. The challenging development process entails wrapping the Ilfochrome paper inside and pouring chemicals into a repurposed sewage pipe, which he then rolls across the ground to develop the image. The time-intensive procedure turns photography away from a snap shot discipline into a process that the artist describes “as part photography, part event, and part sculpture—an undertaking in apparatus and patience.” 

His camera or "big box," as he calls it, functions as a camera obscura, an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings onto an interior screen (or wall). Its very limitations are appealing to Chiara: he can only obtain vistas only from places where he can park his trailer and thus must work within what he calls “fixed parameters.” Indeed, Chiara does this literally as well as conceptually: he climbs inside the box—so that he is physically inside his camera—to focus his images.

Chiara shot Campus Drive at Merritt #1, 2011, along Campus Drive at Merritt College in Oakland. The enigmatic landscape, devoid of recognizable architecture and human presence, combined with a dark tone, evokes a dreamlike state. Chiara “likes to go to places that aren't typically a grand or picturesque view.” Campus Drive, for its barely-there nature makes the viewer feel that he or she looking at someone’s dream or memory. 

Born in San Francisco in 1971, John Chiara earned his MFA in photography at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, in 2004 and his BFA in photography at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, in 1995. Chiara’s work has been featured in a number of publications including Artforum, The New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post. In 2011, the Pilara Foundation, San Francisco, commissioned Chiara to produce photographs of the Golden Gate and Bay bridges for its permanent collection. He was awarded artist residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, and Crown Point Press, San Francisco. His unique photographic methods were the subject of a Spark documentary segment on KQED, San Francisco, in 2006.


Back to event page | Lots: 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16