Mike Rainey: Investigations

‌Much of the work in this exhibit has been supported in part by grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and their support is gratefully acknowledged.

Introduction

Included in this show are traditional black and white photographs (pigment prints), Van Dyke prints (hand printed but with digital‌ contact negatives), and visually complex prints best understood as collage (but more correctly montage) of which the earlier ones were printed by an IRIS printer, and the more recent ones with an exhibition quality inkjet printer.

While I like to explore different materials and processes, the work has remained remarkably constant in its‌ themes…photography as a way of interacting…a way of trying to work out just what it is you know, or believe‌ about the world; documents about places or moments that seemed nearly transcendent, photographs about‌ people you love or places that matter…photography as part of a personal history.

First about process and technique:

Most artists and photographers will tell you process and equipment do not matter, it is the vision and ideas, and the skills to use whatever materials have been chosen that is important, and they are correct. But I have found it is helpful to explain the tools and process first in some cases, so that the reader does not get lost immediately in "artspeak." I do believe it is my vision and ideas that are important, but photography has always been driven by technological changes, and in my case, the tools and process I have used are very much related to my ideas about living in the world. Here is the long version of how these prints are made:

Van Dyke Prints

The Van Dyke prints were created combining nascent digital technology with a nineteenth century process invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842. The Van Dyke process requires one to mix some basic chemistry to create a light sensitive emulsion which one then uses to coat the paper of your choice like the traditional printmaking paper I used here, which comes from paper mills in Europe, like Arches, Lana, or Canson. Those mills have been making fine paper for the arts since the late 1400s. After the paper is coated in the near dark and allowed to dry, the print is created by contact printing, where the size of the negative IS the size of the final print, and the exposure can be done with sunlight, making for a fun summer afternoon if you have the time to do it that way. For consistency, I used a UV light source I could control, a sodium vapor streetlight I set up on my darkroom. After exposure, you just wash the print with water, and “fix” it with another chemical bath to prevent it from getting darker.

I purposefully set out to combine some new digital technology with the handmade 19th century process and I had access to one of the earliest Mac computers and the brand new to the market software by Adobe, but since the only printing process that was reliable and available to me locally was a laser printer, combining digital with Van Dyke printing was a natural choice. Since I had often worked in commercial printing in the years before to make ends meet, I knew the local newspaper had an "Imagesetter" which ran negatives directory from digital files. The format of the first Van Dyke prints was determined by the size limits of the film size the local newspaper could do, about 12 inches high, by 26 inches long.

To create the images, I scanned what were often low quality snapshots, sometimes adding old fashioned 40’s and 50’s era deckled edges to make sure the images were seen as if they were physical objects, and used Photoshop to make collages, almost always letting the edges or unfinished seams show, and making the pixels larger, not smaller, to make sure the digital process was overstated, not hidden, as all my contemporaries seemed interest in doing. I added the type, at first, by placing the Photoshop image into another program like PageMaker since the types of tools in Photoshop at the time were very rudimentary. I exported the file to a format the Imagesetter could "rip" and got the negative back in a few days and was ready to contact print them.

IRIS Prints

The IRIS Printer was the digital machine that ushered in the computer age of fine art printing. They were essentially the first inkjet printers developed in the late 1980s and made beautiful, lush, and saturated images but proved not to be commercially feasible due to cost and their inability to create images that looked like the halftone color images commercial printers need as proofs, plus the prints were very delicate and susceptible to fading. It was a natural step for me to move to creating color images with the IRIS Printer and while it was much more complex than I thought it would be to start thinking in color, the files I now created had to be mailed (yes, mailed as in USPS) to one of the few shops that had an IRIS Printer, and they would UPS the finished print back to me. I was a newbie at color accuracy, and it was not an inexpensive proposition to print several versions to get the colors correct, but it was a good fit for how I was working, and I continued to make them into the late 90s.

Digital Chromogenic Prints

I moved to making Chromogenic LightJet prints in 2003 because I wanted the glossy feel of a color snapshot. I wanted the viewer to feel like they were encountering a photograph not a fine art print of some kind, and the two large 4 ft x 4 ft prints included here are presented without mats, as close to a color snapshot feel as I could get, just oversized.

Chromogenic Prints are what we think of as old-fashioned color prints,  made with light sensitive paper and wet chemistry, like the ones at one time returned to us from our roll of color film by the local drugstore. Often referred to as  "C prints" they were a dominant color photographic process of the 20th Century, and the prints were made by projection, either by hand in the darkroom, or automated such as by a Kodak or Fuji lab, etc.  But as digital technology advanced, there was a demand to create C prints from digital files and a company called Cymbolic Sciences developed the LightJet printer which works by exposing traditional photographic paper (color or black and white) with digitally controlled lasers, after which the paper is processed in traditional wet chemistry.

Digital Gelatin Silver

There are only two of these on exhibit (Red and Bloom). It is the same process as described in the Chromogenic Print explanation, just using Black and White photo paper and chemistry. Now that we can create  black and white photographs on glossy inkjet paper, why make LightJet Black and White prints on traditional black and white paper? The answer is, I don't know, but I am interested in finding out. Just as when I created the very often pixilated Van Dyke prints and I wanted to find out how that affected our acceptance of them as possessing “photographic authority.” it is my inclination to continue making some digital gelatin silver prints to explore that issue.

Archival Pigment Prints

Archival pigment prints are the technically correct name for inkjet prints printed with inks that have been tested for permanence and on a paper that will also not yellow or affect the color or permanence of the image. The ones here were printed by me on either an Epson P5000, or my own Epson P900, which uses 10 different ink colors and will print up to 17 inches wide.

The newer, single black and white photographs, except for one, are made with a digital camera, and the two very old images and one newer portrait (Lizzy, 2024) were made with a 35mm camera and then the film scanned so as to print them digitally. I made that one using the Leica I have had for decades because I wanted to make sure I still knew how!

The contemporary collage/montage work that I printed as pigment prints were done with Photoshop, in a similar manner to the very first Van Dyke prints I made in the early 90s, but finally technology has caught up to a point where I have an affordable means to print them in full color on my own printer.

What is the work about?

The Visually Complex Collage/Montage work

When I first started making the complex montage work, it was because during a very difficult two or three years of my life, I had sold all my camera equipment and had only some snapshots from that part of my life, most often made with my daughter's Instamatic or a borrowed Polaroid camera. When I got back to working again, and reacquired a camera and a darkroom, it made no sense to me to skip over what I had experienced, learned, or come to believe during those years. While I picked up on creating the kinds of images I had been making before that hardship, it felt false not to consider the fuzzy snapshots and the things I had come to believe both about photography and about life. I was rereading Walden at the time, and it was a revelation. I had first read it in my late teens or maybe when I was twenty, but now I was ready for it. The Van Dyke prints always included a passage by Thoreau, a passage from Stanley Cavell's The Senses of Walden, and a somewhat folksy anecdote by me. The texts‌ in the VanDyke prints and IRIS prints are a three-way conversation between Thoreau, American philosopher‌ Stanley Cavell and me.‌

Those visually complex pieces are similar to bulletin boards that draw from personal experiences and memory, and snippets of culture and history. Yet each piece is built within a tensioned space of critical theory (I have aways been very interested in critical theory in art and photography.)  The work might also be described as a series of visual anthologies, and they allow for multiple voices. One can also think of them as if I were a frustrated filmmaker (true), and I have taken many short film snippets, some from memory (both internal and photographic), and some referencing other people’s thoughts that I have found compelling or perhaps tried to make my own, and have made multiple rough cuts, with no concern for realistic duration or flow. This technique is called meronomy as opposed to metaphor, and it forces the disparate pieces into a unified flat plane or print in this case.

The whole is held together by utilizing traditional composition or design strategies (I used to teach graphic design). However, I usually make no effort to “fool the eye” because I want it obvious that I have forced these elements together, that the viewer is not allowed to jump to obvious conclusions. I recently saw a statistic that in a museum setting, typical viewers only pause in front of each artwork for approximately 8 seconds. I try to give enough visual cohesion to get the viewer to give at least the 8-second minimum, but enough enticing details to draw them farther in. For instance, the Van Dyke prints, with their pixilated images, work differently at different viewing distances.... creating a whole from a distance, breaking down into parts as one gets closer, yet one is forced to get close to examine the words.

By presenting photographs as collaged, physical objects with notes and text, all the complex pieces contradict the normal photographic ideal of singular form and meaning. Instead, the work is about reconstructing and reinventing the world, sometimes trying to set it right. The pieces build new context for photographs I have already made or occasionally plucked from family history. While the pairings may yield multiple narratives, the narratives are not open ended. In the simplest explanation I can think of, they are presented as a more truthful kind of photographic realism than we are used to. Photography usually reinforces what we think we already know about the world, and our experience of the world. In these pieces I am saying that the single photograph image may echo part of our experience of the world, but THIS is how life really is: Complex, at times contradictory and greatly influenced by, and  taking place in the ever changing context of cultural and scientific knowledge, and unique personal history and events.

The Single Image Traditional Photographs (most since 2020)

In 2020, I found myself limited not by the pandemic, but physically. I started to make photographs from where, physically, I found myself. Thoreau said when one awakens, meaning intellectually, and I suppose spiritually, it is as if one has woken from the dead and you awake as a new person, next to the old person you used to be. One is therefore “beside oneself” which is usually taken to mean not a good thing. However, see the Van Dyke print Waking Near Oneself which owes its title to philosopher Stanley Cavell in The Senses of Walden where he points out to be beside oneself is a definition of joy.

The photographs I was making therefore, returned me to the question, how does authentic fit into, if it does at all, my own work and contemporary photographic criticism?

Photographers and critics sometimes note the difference between looking, pointing towards something, and seeing. Susan Sontag observed that with photography’s growth, acceptance, and everyday usage, that "...everything existed to be photographed...” But her complete thought was “...to be photographed, not looked at.” Everything does indeed seem to be photographed, but I wondered if everything can still be looked at, and moreover, be seen. And could I find the traditional notion of beauty in such photographs?

Photographs suspend. They suspend everything. I went to great effort in the non-traditional work, where time is the dominant issue, to point that out, and to disagree with Photography's traditional role in reinforcing understanding our lives in terms of a single arrow of time. our But these photographs, it seemed to me, did not really fix, and they suggested to me the opposite, that nothing can indeed be fixed.

As I worked, I did not feel like the outside observer. It seemed like the world was peering back at me—to be beside oneself is also to be beside the world as one used to know it, yet one is still in the world: and I think that is where these photographs come from. T.S. Eliot famously called it “at the still point” in Burnt Norton (1936).

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.