This piece is an example from the beginning of the Sunburn series when McCaw was first was photographing the sun directly on large format film and burning through the medium. The resulting burnt and solarized film negative was then contact printed onto a hand-coated Platinum/Palladium print. It is the original and only artist proof from a printed edition of 5 prints.

McCaw spent his youth in the 80’s and 90’s 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 7"x17” view camera to make negatives for contact printing in the  platinum/palladium printing process. 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 over 25 public collections, and in 2012 a monograph Sunburn was published by Candela Books. He is having his first solo exhibition at Haines Gallery in San Francisco in March 2017.