John MacLean Photographer

14/08/2025

FujiFilm S5000. A chop shop is a clandestine garage where stolen vehicles are dismantled for parts. In CAMERA CHOP SHOP, the vehicle… is a digital camera. Parsing it (dismantling it piece by piece) is both literal and metaphorical.

While parsing usually clarifies, here it estranges. The camera’s role (to generate a digital simulacrum of the real) collapses as its body explodes into nonfunctioning fragments.

In CAMERA CHOP SHOP BERLIN, with The Artists’ Books Cooperative, I invite visitors to take a micro-screwdriver and undo the image machine. What’s left will be a sparkling scatter of orphaned components: circuit boards, screws, springs, accumulating like glistening mechanical space debris across plinths in the gallery.

Take it apart. CHOP UNTIL YOU DROP.

Come along to welcome ABC members for the start of their residency and a soft opening of ABC CHOP on Saturday, 16 August, 6–9 pm at Acre Studios, .cc, Berlin. Shout out to for the linguistic détournement of skew-naming ABC’s Shop: CHOP SHOP.

09/08/2025

(Artists’ Hometowns, 2013.) I photographed the hometown of chain-smoking Lewis Baltz, a central figure in the groundbreaking New Topographics movement of the 1970s. I met him once: he was as debonair as Fred Astaire. Baltz’s stark, unromantic photographs redefined how we see the built environment, capturing the anonymous architecture and industrial sprawl of the American landscape. It all began here, in Newport Beach, California, amid the creeping tract houses of postwar America and the arid, dusty coastal light of Southern California... a place where his father sold real estate and oil derricks still loomed over the sand like a war-blackened army of AT-AT Walkers.

22/05/2025

Laugably lumbering lightness: the paradox of passenger flight. 300 tonnes of wanting to be somewhere else. Triple-bogey Boeing 777— curved wing roots; riveted skin panels. A high, high-density configuration: 550 seats of cabin pressure compromise. hedging the attention economy and parlaying the Ponzi-picture-pyramid, since 2008.

17/09/2019

Now online: https://www.jmaclean.co.uk/art/your-nature/

30/06/2019

New artist's edition of Outthinking the Rectangle out now: https://www.jmaclean.co.uk/store/outthinking-the-rectangle/

15/03/2019

Making big prints from my series Outthinking the Rectangle for upcoming group show. Deets to follow. https://www.jmaclean.co.uk/art/edge/

06/02/2019

Axe. From my new series, Your Nature.

26/01/2019

From the series Your Nature.

02/12/2018

From my new series. Your Nature.

09/09/2018