"Sunburns and Shotguns: contemporary photographic indexicality in the alternative processes of Chris McCaw and Marco Breuer"

A presentation prepared for the 2010 Southeastern College Arts Conference

Abstract: The history of photography is primary the story of the camera-based image. This sequential trajectory—from the daguerreotype and calotype to the glass-plate negative, from the brownie camera to the cellphone digital camera—favors the immediately captured image, and the mechanical over the hand-made. But what this history leaves out is the continuity of artistic interest in alternative photographic processes.

Whether as an independent interest or a reaction to new technologies, alternative processes continue to thrive regardless of criticisms against it. The term "alternative processes" was used in the 1960s as a "slogan of opposition to Kodak" and its threat to dominate materials and processes of photography. It celebrates the use of photographic materials to document the experience of reality, as well as to intervene in that experience. It supports "not a looking at or a looking through but a looking with.""

In opposition to standard trajectories of the camera-based photographic image, contemporary photographers Marco Breuer and Chris McCaw revisit concepts regarding the indexicality and medium-specificity of photography. Initially instigated during 19th century experimental "photogenic drawings" Breuer and McCaw's processes highlight artistic interventions into analogue photography's fundamental qualities: light, time, and photosensitive chemistry.

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