John Chiara, and California’s Beauty and Terror

When I saw John Chiara’s photographs of California for the first time, I thought of wildfires. It was still fire season in late December of 2017, and smoke from Montecito was blowing up to San Francisco. Each day I counted as the acres of flame grew and grew. I spent much of my time looking at footage of the fires. I’d seen the Getty Museum surrounded on all sides by flames on CNN.

I had just moved west, from New York to San Francisco, for a reporting job. Wildfires were new to me—their size, their improbable beauty, their terror. I was transfixed. Such fires constitute their own genre of photography. I think in particular of Los Angeles Times photographer Marcus Yam’s  widely circulated photo of palm trees burning in Ventura, the entire sky hell-red behind their thin trunks, ruptured with orange.

John Chiara does not take pictures of fire. But his photos evoke fire photography. They have its same otherworldly quality, enchanting and disquieting colors, and massive scale.

The San Francisco-based artist, whose work focuses largely on California, photographs landscapes using an unusually toilsome method. He builds giant cameras, which are often so big he has to drag them around on the backs of trucks or attach them to his trailer. Some of his subjects are classic California fare: trees in the snow, red flowers in a field and the Pacific glinting with sun, gas stations and power lines and the pastel houses