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© John Chiara John Chiara with his 50 x 80 camera on a trailer. To compose an image, he has to climb inside of it. To see images taken with his homemade cameras, click on the Photo Gallery link below. |
By David Walker
Crafting a unique image can require a photographer to think beyond the mass-produced tools of the photographic industry. In our DIY Issue we interviewed three photographers who built their own cameras in order to achieve the photographs they envisioned.
For San Francisco photographer John Chiara, the process of making landscape photographs inside a homemade, U-Haul-size camera obscura that he tows behind his SUV is part and parcel to the images themselves.
“The process I have developed comes out of a desire to make a certain type of image/object that you can’t make through traditional photographic processes,” he says. The huge, unwieldy camera makes the act of taking a picture an event in itself, and the image, he says, is the memory of the event.
The camera is constructed of wood and insulation foam, and mounted on a flatbed trailer. Inspired by the work of Carleton Watkins, Lewis Baltz, Henry Wessel and others, Chiara primarily photographs landscapes around the Bay Area. He makes the images directly on chromogenic paper rather than on film.
“Basically [the camera] gets ratcheted together in the field,” Chiara says. “You have to focus it mathematically, bolt the lens on, then you climb inside and check the focus and image, adhere the paper to the back of the camera, take the picture, take down the paper, put it in a lightproof roll, then take the camera back apart for transport.”
He crawls in and out of his camera through a lightproof plastic sleeve, and exposes the photographic paper by removing the lens cap. “While I am exposing the paper I am also dodging and burning and making adjustments to the color filtration.” The prints are so large that he uses a long section of plastic sewer pipe to process them.
“In the end it functions exactly like an early daguerreotype camera. I didn’t plan that, but that is the camera design that works best for what I am doing.”
Chiara built the camera in 2003. He says the challenges of making it functional are “too many to list.” The somewhat flimsy construction materials he used to build the camera made it easier for him to make design modifications, but they also require frequent repairs and adjustments.
Chiara says he uses “precision barrel lenses,” but it took a long time to find and modify them. “Usually lenses are symmetrical with the aperture in the center. I have taken mine apart, putting an element behind with the aperture in front, to create a traditional meniscus landscape lens.”
It isn’t Chiara’s first DIY camera. Fifteen years ago he started experimenting with a Linhof 4 x 5, exposing chromogenic paper directly. He liked the results so he constructed a 16 x 20 camera, which he used to make large, macro images of objects in his studio. Eventually, he says, “I felt the work was getting too heavy on precision, technique and effect.”
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