Michael Rainey

Artist Statement

These photographs were made during my daily routines in my home environments and in my walking investigations of the surrounding environs and occasional visits with extended family who live in rural communities nearby. It is content most viewers can easily understand and appreciate, unlike most of my work since the 1980s. Over the years, with varying attitudes about my subject matter, I have worked my way through the traditional photography genres: document, landscape, portrait, mixed media, conceptual, still life, and “made to be photographed.” But I did not show any work between 2005 and 2022, and during that time, I struggled with the question, ‘What does authentic mean to me, now?” 

In 2020, I found myself limited physically, as I recovered from a triple bypass. I started to make photographs from where, physically, I found myself. (Thoreau said when one awakens, essentially “beside oneself”...as if to find oneself, it is as if one has woken from the dead, and wherever that happens, that you will surely identify that as home.) Well, I was already home, and I thought, perhaps somewhat mistakenly, already awake. Afterall, I had been making photographs for nearly 50 years. But these resulting photographs seemed different. From where I was, what did I see? I did not search for photographs, nor did I set out to “make” photographs. I let them present themselves to me. 

If authenticity is to be found in these pictures, and I think that is a reasonable experience of them, it has been achieved by a practiced visual form coupled with an intimate knowledge of the space we exist in, an appreciation of companionship, and an abiding interest in, and care for, the people we love and live with.

Michael Rainey | Hansen, Idaho

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