The title of McCaw’s “Sunburn Series” is entirely literal. Setting his camera up for long exposures in the Mojave Desert or by San Francisco Bay, he lets his open lens work as a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s light on paper negatives. The photographs that result, each unique, are dark, day-for-night images in which the path of the sun is recorded as a gouge or a curved incision. The series recalls Marco Breuer’s scorched and abraded work on photographic paper and the slashed canvases of Lucio Fontana, but McCaw’s burns are grounded in landscape, and they’re as fascinating as meteors streaking across the sky.
–Vince Aletti

…Mr. McCaw speaks with his own sure voice. I hope he takes it as a compliment that I am inspired to relate his work to the art of these other great artists. The most successful work to me are the pictures which focus on the destruction of the paper as an abstract device within a composition which is at the fringes of abstraction. I love the tension between what I know to be a once-in-a-lifetime moment that is captured photographically and an image which is virtually unrecognizable as nature. Just as in Fontana, I love to see the violence in the paper; the burned edges and gaps which explode the illusion of 3 dimensionality in a 2 dimensional sheet of paper. The charred holes both diminish the effectiveness of the object as a photo and expand its effectiveness as a work of art with layered meaning. Super. Check it out.

Read the complete review at Fugitive Vision.

…These are not just photographs but physical objects that require 3-dimensional space to fully make their case. On the web the photographs appear straightforward but in reality they explore space and time in wonderfully ambitious ways. The photographs also recall the long lost history of mega-large format photography as represented by Carelton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. The main difference being that McCaw’s images look like they’ve been jacked up on monochromatic acid…


Read the complete review at Horses Think.