SAN FRANCISCO - CALIFORNIA
San Francisco ‘02 - ‘05
John Chiara / On San Francisco
In 2003, Chiara’s photography featured jagged elements on the surface of the paper. “There was a lot of psychological disruption to the image. I felt it was meaningful to the state I was in. It was a difficult time for me--I was dealing with a lot of stuff, working too hard running my own business. You do it because it feels empowering. Larry always recognized the sense of controlled chaos in my work, but he told me the control had gone too far. My hands were in it too much.”
“Larry was probably the most articulate, intuitive professor I’ve ever had. Almost shamanistic at times. He had a hyper intuition--he’d be looking at your work and he’d get so under the surface of it, and he could articulate it so well. After that conversation, I started to find elements in the landscape that would disrupt the field of view. I became more of a photographer.”
Born in San Francisco and growing up in the hills outside of Concord and Walnut Creek, Chiara’s work has been rooted in the Bay Area for more than 20 years. As a boy, he found himself drawn to early photographers of northern California such as Carleton Watkins, who used an over-sized camera and huge glass plate negatives. Chiara’s work combines that West Coast lens with an appreciation for the imperfections of the medium: hazy light, uneven exposure, and the jagged edges from the original cuts
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