John Chiara

John Chiara  (b. 1971, San Francisco, CA) earned a B.F.A. in photography from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in 1995 and an M.F.A. in photography from the California College of the Arts in 2004. Chiara pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium through his choice of process and the mastery of its possibilities. His approach is distinguished by its physicality and recalls the early days of the medium, when artists dealt with heavy equipment and long exposure and development times. Chiara’s giant cameras, which he designed and built himself, are transported to locations on a flatbed trailer to produce one-of-a-kind large-scale prints. Images are recorded directly onto oversized photosensitive paper, allowing the artist to shoot and perform his darkroom work simultaneously. This process invites anomalies in his final prints and adds to the mystery and lyricism of his pictures. 

His work is held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the George Eastman Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. John Chiara lives and works in San Francisco.