Haines Gallery presents Elemental II: Photography & The Hand Of Nature, a group exhibition of works by John Chiara, Linda Connor, Binh Danh, Chris McCaw, and Meghann Riepenhoff, at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC). The artists are West Coast photographers who create handcrafted prints that celebrate and collaborate with the natural world.

Elemental II is on view at the Haines Gallery in Building C from July 11, 2025 through September 5, 2025, Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The opening reception takes place on Friday, July 11, 2025, 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

The second iteration of Haines’ eponymous 2023 exhibition, Elemental II brings together new and recent works taken across the American West and as far as the Arctic Circle, and explores themes including landscape and memory, place and belonging, ecological trauma, and environmental stewardship. The exhibition’s title is meant to evoke the active role that nature plays – physically and chemically, as natural forces and natural elements – in composing the works on view.

About The Artists

John Chiara (born 1971, lives and works in San Francisco) describes his process as “part photography, part sculpture, and part event.” Printing directly onto photographic paper with his hand-built, large-format cameras, Chiara’s landscapes retain the visible vestiges of their creation: uneven hand-cut edges, tape marks, light leaks, subtle chemical streaking. At once dream-like and lucid, with natural and man-made features emerging in razor-sharp focus, the work speaks to the elusive contours of memory as they relate to a specific moment or place.

Linda Connor is a celebrated photographer with a long and distinguished career in photography and has traveled extensively to produce her work to places such as India, Turkey, Peru, Iceland, and Southeast Asia.

Binh Danh’s (b. 1977, lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area) daguerreotypes of Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and other US National Parks demonstrate his command of an exacting 19th-century process, inviting us to see ourselves (literally) reflected in his plates. Extending the pursuit of pioneering photographers such as Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins – whose iconic images the artist had seen long before stepping foot in these parks – Danh’s contemporary daguerreotypes expand our experience of these sites through his distinct perspective as a Vietnamese American. Idyllic landscapes are layered with timely questions of access and belonging, exclusion and displacement, and who is allowed to be behind the camera.

Chris McCaw (b. 1971, lives and works in Pacifica, CA) chases the sun to create his elegantly composed landscapes, capturing its presence as circular burns or searing arcs over the horizon. The powerful lenses within his hand-built cameras act as magnifying glasses, burning the sun’s path across light-sensitive paper over long exposures in locations ranging from the Mojave Desert to the Arctic Circle. The works result from a careful choreography between artist and nature, dependent as much on the elements as on McCaw’s understanding of his tools. The work disrupts the idea that a photograph is simply a representation of reality, instead becoming a physical record of planetary movement and the passage of time.

Nature is likewise both subject and collaborator in a selection of new cyanotypes by Meghann Riepenhoff (b. 1979, lives and works in Bainbridge Island, WA). Placing paper coated in homemade emulsion directly within the landscape, she invites the elements to physically inscribe themselves onto her materials. Riepenhoff’s prints are full of subtle and strikingly diverse details: colors ranging from deep, inky blues to surprising streaks of magenta and green, and ice formations that can appear as crystalline shards or feathery blooms. Informed by temperature and chemical make-up of water, each piece is a wholly unique record of time and place.