At age thirteen, Chris McCaw’s mom forced him to take a photo course at the community center. He got hooked instantly. Concurrently, McCaw spent his youth in the punk and skateboarding scenes, taking the “DIY” motto of those cultures and applying it to photography. The first camera he built in 1995 was a 7x17” view camera to make contact negatives for platinum prints.

Over the ensuing decades—and particularly with his Sunburn project—McCaw has used photographic materials, especially expired gelatin silver paper, in groundbreaking ways. His work is held in numerous public collections, and in 2012 a monograph Sunburn was published by Candela Books. His second solo exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York opened on March 4, 2016.