De ses propres clichés, Carl Chiarenza disait: «Les paysages qui apparaissent sur mes photographies sont en rapport avec des idées sur l'évolution temporelle de la nature. Pour moi, ce sont des paysages mentaux (...)». En abandonnant très tôt le sujet le sujet reconnaissable au profit de constructions cristallines, Chiarenza faisait clairement état du rôle spirituel que jouait son professeur, Minor White, dans son oeuvre. D'un point de vue visuel, ses photographies se trouvent aussi en parfaite harmonie avec les images abstraites de Siskind.
Carl Chiarenza is a photographic renaissance man. He is first and foremost a terrifically inventive and endlessly curious maker of photographic images. Garry Winogrand was fond of saying, when asked why he shot a particular scene "I wanted to see what that looked like photographed ". There's a lot packed into that little zinger, about photography, representation, transformation, and the object that is the resulting photograph. Although it is not always obvious, Carl really is a concrete kind of guy. He makes, and works from collages that he constructs from this and that, sometimes literally garbage, or torn scraps. The act of photographing these collages stimulates the artist's mind. First, while constructing them, then while transforming them into a new object, the photograph, which refers grudgingly b...