John Chiara makes large-scale, unique photographs using a camera obscura of his own design. If you were to catch him on the mobile early on a work day, he might say, “Hang on while I park the camera.” The Big Camera, as it has become known, is roughly the size of a U-Haul, which Chiara drives all over the San Francisco Bay Area, creating mural-size images of landscapes that evoke a preternatural meeting of earth, sky, and human intervention. Each image is identified by its location, yet the information in the pictures transcends description, inviting viewers to connect with their own experience of space and time.

Notions of photographic truth and memory are both inherent and veiled in these expressionistic images. Chiara recently wrote on this subject,“Photography has a long and complicated relationship to memory and the madness of the self-encounter. I find that strong visual memories are produced because of their psychological connection to moments of intense self-reconciliation. As time passes, what was being reconciled becomes no longer attached, but the psychological weight burns the visual into memory. Visual memory seems to always be in flux. Memories are unbound, with divergent edges. You have to move around in them to get to points of clarity.”

Three images from the Starr King: Coral Beacon series, copyright and courtesy John Chiara.

With an exhibition of new work by Chiara opening Thursday at Von Lintel Gallery in Chelsea, I caught up with him last week for this email interview:

Peggy Roalf: What kind of pictures did you make when you first became seriously interested in photography?
John Chiara: I think I have always been seriously interested in photography. I was seduced by it at a very young age. I grew up sitting in a darkroom watching my father develop black-and-white prints under a red light. Watching the image come out of nowhere was magical to me, as a child. Since then I have used photography primarily as a method consisting of careful observation, pre-visualization and intuition. The pictures I have taken throughout my life have for the most part been of nothing in particular. 

PR: When did the idea of personal vs. photographic truth vs. photo-historical memory become part of your ethos?
JC: In 1994 I graduated from college and moved back to the Bay Area. At this time I got a job at a lab. A sweat shop really. The one good thing about it was that the job was not very stimulating in any way. I was able to spend eight hours a day [at the lab] thinking over what I was reading, Mostly biographies of important writers and photographers. I also spent this time thinking about the photographs I was making, what photography is, ideas about photographic memory, etc. These things tend to seep into your work. This went on for years.

PR: Has living in the Bay Area influenced your approach to photography?
JC: In a way, yes. I definitely am influenced by what is right around me and the Bay Area has the right ingredients. I am able to find the images I want to make here. Also, over the years I have been able to carve out just enough space in San Francisco to develop my process.

PR: What were you working on when you realized that you needed a specific type of camera, one that you would build yourself, to get the kind of images you had in mind?
JC: Once I started contact printing my 2-1/4 negatives from my twin lens camera, I realized that I could never enlarge an image again. This was in 1994. I was working on a series of images that are strikingly similar to the images in the Fort at Lime Point series. I was photographing the same sculptures at Laney Junior College and paring them with photographs of barren slopes that resemble the Fort Barry Shooting Range photograph in the show.

PR: Most of your work involves Bay Area hilltop landscapes, but not scenic vistas. What drew you to this subject matter?
JC: I grew up on a hilltop in the Bay Area. I am not nostalgic about my youth and do not long for the past, but I do feel strongly connected to the visuals I remember from that period. In San Francisco there are 11 hills. Almost all of them are completely developed. This limits my options since I need to find a place that I can pull up to and park my car and trailer. I think these limitations are good. It forces you to work with the options you have and see what is really there.

PR: Your images have an electric quality that results, in part, from your hands-on process of incorporating both shooting and printing into a single activity. How did this approach first strike you as a possibility? How did you cultivate the kind of patience it must take to work at such a slow pace—making one, or at the most, two images per day?

JC: In 1999, after spending much time and energy, isolating objects in my studio and making large macro shots of them, I felt the work was getting too heavy on precision, technique, and effect. At this point, there was a shift in my approach to methods more rooted in psychology—both in the process of making the work and in the effect it would ultimately have on the viewer. So I built a large camera and mounted it on a flat bed trailer. The size and nature of the equipment physically forced the process beyond my ability to control it completely. Like a psychological event, the outcome of each shooting session can never be fully known for sure. I have to use a lot of intuition in making the work, which is based from the experiences of the work done previously. For this show, after watching the negative transparencies I was working on not turn out right on the third attempt, a lab tech said I was crazy to go back and do all the work over again. It caught me off guard. I think of this process as the work. That is where my mind is at.

PR: Is the Fort at Lime Point series, now on view at Von Lintel Gallery, the first group you’ve shot in Marin County?
JC: Last fall I was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, at Fort Barry in the Headlands. That is when I started photographing there. Soon after, I was commissioned by the Pilara Foundation to photograph the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges for their current exhibition, HERE [more]. The Golden Gate is one of the most photographed objects on earth. There is this one spot at the tip of the Headlands called Point Bonita where I would go every morning, because that was the only area where there was cell phone coverage. I was pretty clear that this was the right location. It was as far west as I could get. It ended up being a difficult photograph to capture, because of the unpredictability of the morning fog and inflexible police. In the end I decided on making a slightly stereographic set where the bridges are in both images but at the same time the diptychs as a whole expresses the expanse of the bay. The work I am showing at Von Lintel Gallery, Fort at Lime Point, comes directly after making the Golden Gate Bridge Diptych [video].

John Chiara: Fort at Lime Point opens Thursday, November 17^th, 6-8 pm and continues through January 7, 2012 at Von Lintel Gallery, 520 West 23^rd Street, NY, NY. View a video about a day’s work with The Big Camera, KQED. John Chiara's website. 2008 feature in DART.

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