YCBA Collections Search

Christopher Bucklow began his career as a curator of prints and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In the late 1980s he quit museum work in favor of making his own art and began experimenting with painting, sculpture, and photography. In the 1990s he began creating photographs of the human body made through exposure to the sun rather than with a conventional camera and lens. Bucklow made these by tracing his models on metal foil and piercing the foil with hundreds of tiny holes. The sun was then allowed to pass through the holes when the foil was laid onto a prepared photographic paper and exposed to natural light. The result is luminous figures created from hundreds of intense bursts of sunlight. Bucklow called this series Guest and took himself as a model as well as recruiting members of his circle of friends.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016