John Chiara Illuminates the World’s Simple Mysteries / aperture mag
It’s a bleak thought, but one that must be confessed, that our own life is something we don’t understand—one that must be addressed, to see an art such as John Chiara makes. Since the age of sixteen, Chiara has maintained a darkroom, a way of developing for himself the images he’s taken, but a process ornate enough that he began to suspect it interfered with the direct experience of vision and memory driving his artistic inquiry.
He sought another way, one that is extraordinarily labor-intensive: Chiara builds the cameras he uses, and they’re large. Imagine a Hasselblad box magnified to the size of a small house, towed on a trailer behind a truck and in which the photosensitive paper on which the image is made is put in the camera by stepping inside the camera itself. These cameras reach back through time to the beginnings of the art form itself, the camera obscura, light inverted through a lens and the upside-down image cast back onto the paper for hours. The handmade camera invites in leaks of light and breeze as an inherent part of a process that seeks anything but to be merely in control.Click image to view the portfolio
