Lot 21: Seven Chimneys-Carter-Highway 1, 2013

John Chiara (b.1971) Seven Chimneys-Carter-Highway 1, 2013 unique dye-bleach print signed and dated in pencil (on the verso) image/sheet: approximately 32 1/2 x 27 3/4in. (82.5 x 70.4 cm.)

82.5 x 70.4 cm.

Standing tall at the forefront of a generation of artist-photographers who have found lasting inspiration in the plenitude of analogue photographic processes, John Chiara has steadily built a significant body of work, accompanied by a burgeoning reputation among curators and collectors. Born in the early 1970s and hailing from San Francisco, Chiara is of the last generation to enter school and embrace photography as his chosen artistic medium before the advent of all things digital. As a student, he fell in love with the wealth of detail that can be recorded with a large-format camera, and the magic of chemistry-based materials. Early in his artistic practice however, he became dissatisfied with the amount of information lost through the traditional enlargement process, yet the visual language of his imagery didn’t lend itself to small, contact prints. Instinctively, he knew that size and scale were needed for the work he was making, and the delicacy of traditional contact prints fell flat. Over an extended period of time, Chiara worked to solve this dilemma by applying the most basic of photographic principles in unexpected ways, problem-solving as any driven artist does. His solution has yielded breathtaking results. Chiara crafted several hand-built cameras, in which he is able to expose large sheets of light-sensitive photographic paper. The largest apparatus is a 50” x 80” field camera, transported on the back of a flatbed trailer. Once he chooses a location to make an image, he then physically enters the camera, and in total darkness hangs unexposed color photo paper on the inside back wall of the camera. This commercially produced paper is intended for making positive prints from film transparencies; Chiara bypasses this intermediary step, resulting in unique prints. There is neither a negative nor a master digital file from which to print multiples, thus upending the myth of the infinitely reproducible photograph, and producing a rare and exquisite object. Throughout the in-camera exposure, and due to lengthy exposure times, he uses his hands to burn and dodge the image, like one would in a darkroom. The paper is then processed by hand in large spinning drums through which flow the different chemical baths needed to develop and fix the image. The amount of handling involved from start to finish—from imperfectly trimming paper in the dark, to taping it to the back of the camera, to multiple heated chemical baths—often leaves behind material traces on the finished print. As the artist states, his images are “rendered in soft hues that exude a strong sense of the viscosity of material and the ephemerality of presence.” The present lot was made during an extended trip to Coahoma County in the state of Mississippi, at the invitation of Seven Chimneys and the Porch Society, of Clarksdale. ‘The sun radiates and creates an energy here like no other place,’ Chiara writes. ‘This is an area that has consistently flooded over and over again for several thousand years, making it one of the most fertile regions of the world.’ Chiara’s work is held in the collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Pilara Foundation, San Francisco, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, among others.