McCaw’s singular artistic practice foregrounds photography’s essential components – light and time, lenses and light-sensitive materials – to generate startlingly inventive photographic forms.

Reversals & Revolutions debuts McCaw’s newest body of work, “Inverse,” alongside a selection of his signature “Sunburn” prints. Rendered entirely in-camera through McCaw’s years-long mastery of complex and little-known photographic processes, the exhibited works are unique, direct prints – emerging from the camera to the developer tray without post-processing, cropping, or manipulation: raw recordings of light. This highly anticipated exhibition marks McCaw’s first solo showing in San Francisco in nearly a decade and opens in tandem with SF Art Week 2026.

McCaw’s “Inverse” series expands upon the analog tools he has evolved over the past two decades. To produce these new works, the artist deploys a technique called solarization, a tonal reversal between negative and positive that occurs through extreme, in-camera overexposure. Using multiple exposures and custom-cut dark slides that mask parts of the frame, McCaw trains the lenses of his hand-built cameras not on the sun but on Earth’s terrain, exploring how the photographic negative and positive can serve as visual metaphors for how we see the landscape and navigate its changing manifestations.

In some of these resulting new works, the positive area is framed within a central oculus, as if training our eyes on the site with a pair of binoculars or a camera’s viewfinder as the borders recede into a negative, latent state. In others, the landscape strobes with alternating passages of positive and negative tones, rendering otherworldly horizons with meticulous detail. By integrating the negative (normally considered as a means to an end) into the finished piece, McCaw disrupts our visual and emotional expectations, inviting a closer look at changing environments we might otherwise dismiss as familiar or easily understood.

The sun is both subject and instrument in McCaw’s iconic “Sunburn” works, one-of-a-kind photographic objects that are literally drawn with light. Here, the high-powered lenses of his handmade cameras harness the power of the sun, allowing it to literally burn its path across light sensitive paper loaded directly into the camera. Over exposures lasting anywhere between several seconds to entire days, the sun renders its own presence as circular burns or searing arcs over the horizon.

Reversals & Revolutions features an array of technically ambitious “Sunburn” works in which the solar incisions are scorched across multiple panels during sequential exposures or arranged in cartographic grids. Each work results from careful choreography between artist and nature, planning and chance. McCaw travels to locations based on the angle and power of the sun at a particular time of year, composing remarkable images that may trace the sun’s unbroken path from evening to morning in the Alaskan summer, when it never sets below the horizon, or its vertical ascent in the Galapagos, near the equator. McCaw’s “Sunburn” works are tactile, visceral, and temporal, the spin of the Earth and the passage of time made material.

Taken together, Reversals & Revolutions offers a profound meditation on analog photography’s foundational elements and its continued capacity for reinvention. Across both bodies of work, McCaw pushes the medium beyond conventions, revealing landscapes shaped not only by geography and astronomy, but by the artist’s own experimental rigor. The exhibition underscores McCaw’s role as one of contemporary photography’s most inventive practitioners, inviting viewers to reconsider the familiar world through processes that are as conceptually rich as they are visually arresting.