Artist Statement
—Text below courtesy of the Berkeley Art Museum
McCorkle’s series of 135 large-scale photographs titled You & Me On A Sunny Day is conceived as a silent film in the form of a sequence of stills. The works, seen in order, tell the story of an elderly woman recollecting, and at times dreaming about, her deceased husband and his youth as a champion long-distance runner. All of the interior shots were made in the artist’s own San Francisco apartment, which he transformed into a complex mise-en-scène for the unfolding narrative. To complete his monumental project, McCorkle spent every Sunday for five years photographing his downstairs neighbor, Gilda Todar, in the lead role.
The astonishing clarity and richness of detail in the prints is the result of a painstaking process of shooting up to twenty-two individual high-resolution photographs for each final image, using digital technology to create a fantastically seamless montage.
Process Statement
Echoing the big screen, the exhibition prints are 40” x 80". Each photograph’s rich color and clarity reveal a technical prowess hidden behind McCorkle’s compelling aesthetic. The entire body of work was shot with a Cambo 8 x 10 camera using a specific combination of chrome and negative film. Shooting and scanning thousands of sheets of film, McCorkle digitally assembled the high resolution images—upwards of 22 in a single still—into unique full focus photomontages.
Rocky McCorkle is a Bay-Area photographer whose goal for the last five years (2007-2012) was to create the first large-format (8x10-inch film) photo narrative. From start to finish, the final exhibition for 'You & Me On A Sunny Day' will measure over 1000 feet in length (requiring more than "3 football fields" of wall space).
McCorkle received his BFA in Photography from The Ohio State University and his MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute.
He has shown extensively throughout the United States and abroad including Boston, New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Toronto, and Busan, Korea. In 2012, McCorkle’s You & Me On A Sunny Day was selected as the Analog Winner for EXPOSURE 2011 International Photography Award.
In 2012, the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM/PFA) acquired McCorkle's work for their permanent collection.
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