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Visionary State—An Interview with Michael Rauner
By Robert A. Schaefer, Jr. | Wisdom and Inspiration |
Jan 8, 2007
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All images © Michael Rauner
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| Nightscape, Black Rock City |
In March 2006
at Houston’s Fofofest, I met another photographer, Michael Rauner,
whose images of religious sites located in or near California impressed
me. In June 2006, these images were published in The Visionary State,
a collaborative book project with author Erik Davis. The text by
Davis takes readers through a whole range of sites associated with
“California consciousness,” and Michael’s images provide the very
important visual element of this fascinating account. In October
2006, Michael opened an exhibition of this work at The Studio in Jersey
City, New Jersey. An article on this gallery and its owners Rikki
Reich and Dan Contrino appeared in Double Exposure in early December of
last year. Just before the end of last year I was able to catch Michael
at his San Francisco studio and find out more about this photographer
and his craft.
Robert Schaefer: Tell me about
yourself. Were you actually born in California, or are you one of those
transported to this beloved state to experience its unusual lifestyles?
Michael Rauner:
I am a third generation Californian. My grandfather had his tonsils
removed in the military hospital of San Francisco's Presidio in 1915,
the same year he used to sneak into the World's Fair—an event that
featured a famously influential pavilion of world religions. He moved
to San Diego in 1929 and worked on road-building crews for San Diego
Gas and Electric, surveying for power lines. He was able to catch a
glimpse of the fading frontier of the west while working in the dusty
regions of California, Arizona and Nevada almost a century ago. I drove
his old truck all over California to make photographs for The Visionary State.
My great-grandmother was a member of the Catholic Daughters of America
when they helped the rebuilding efforts of the famously reconstructed
California Missions. A few years ago I was making a handmade
photographic book about the San Diego Mission museum. I photographed
many of the photographs there, and my father—a history buff with sharp
eyes—spotted his mother and grandmother in a picture on display from
1932, standing in front of the mission just after its theatrical
reconstruction was complete.
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| Rooftop Tower, Vendanta Old Temple, San Francisco |
California, with its incredibly diverse spiritual and geographical
landscapes, has definitely shaped part of who I am. Like my
collaborator Erik Davis, I grew up in San Diego in the 1970's, when the
heady days of the spiritual counter-culture was still going strong.
Though I was brought up in a Catholic family and attended a
traditional/medieval Catholic elementary school, evidence of
California's unique landscape was never far. Seems like there were
always Hari-Krishnas and people smoking pot at the beach. Early on, I
was drawn to particularly Californian pursuits of spirituality and
consciousness exploration.
RS:How did you get into photography?
MR: When
I was still in elementary school, I kept reaching for my parent's
camera and burning through their film, so they signed me up for a
community photo class the summer before I went to High School. In High
School I signed up for yearbook/newspaper class because there was no
photography course offered. I helped rebuild the school's abandoned
darkroom and spent countless hours of my adolescence there. Photography
provided a sense of identity and was a ballast that helped me navigate
the trials that particular time in my life. Actually, it still does
this for me, 20 years later.
I was discouraged to continue photography in college, and after first
studying art, I shifted to literature. I have always had a fascination
with storytelling and literature and planned on becoming an English
teacher. I stopped taking photographs for about two and a half
years—the only time I haven't taken pictures since I was about 14. In
hindsight, studying literature instead of art was probably the best
thing I ever did for my art. The primary means of expressing my
photographic artwork these days is through hand-made books of narrative
photography, sometimes with text.
I moved to San Francisco partially because there is such a strong photo
community here. I started volunteering at the Friends of Photography
when Andy Grundberg was the director. I volunteered for almost every
workshop and class that they offered, and worked with Michael Read on
SEE magazine, and taught visual literacy with Julia Brashares in their
"Look Again" educational program in public schools. I helped install
shows and went to most of the lectures. Deborah Klotchko was the
Associate Director at that time and she told me about a job
opening at SF Camerawork and gave a great recommendation.
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| Altar Hall, Bok Kai Temple, Marysville |
Marnie Gillette hired me to develop the mentoring/education program,
"First Exposures: Youth Opportunity through Photography" at SF
Camerawork. Marnie was great, and she became a friend and always
supported my work as a teacher and an artist. "First Exposures" just
celebrated its 10-year anniversary with the publication of a book of
the student's work and the program's history,
http://www.sfcamerawork.org/press/press_FXbooks.html.
Camerawork had a small staff of only four people, I was the
education/programs coordinator, proprietor, installer, docent, janitor,
and was on the programming committee. I learned how shows were put
together, and I got to review a lot of work. It was great, but I worked
all the time and couldn't spend enough time on my photography. I quit
to try to lean more deeply into my art making and started working
freelance as a photographer. Around that time I started showing my
project Reliquary DNA and then started shooting more traditional work
with the Hasselblad.
Volunteering at The Friends of Photography for three years, then
working as staff at Camerawork for almost four years were the biggest
influences on my development as a photographer. Though I enrolled in
classes at San Francisco City College and crashed a few classes at the SF Art
Institute, my education mostly came from non-profit photography centers.
RS: Have any photographers or other artists had any influence on your work?
MR:
My favorite photographer is Joan Fontecuberta. I've loved his
work for over a decade. Other contemporary favorites include Joel
Sternfeld, Larry Sultan, Bob Dawson, Peter Beard, and Martin
Parr—especially for his work on the history of photography books. 19th
century favorites include portraitists Julia Margarite Cameron and
Nadar, and I love Grand Tour/Western landscape photographers John
Beasley Green, Francis Frith, Carlton Watkins and Edward Muybridge.
Before working at Camerawork, I was Michael Light's printer and
assistant. His style of bookmaking and sequencing work influenced me
incredibly. I worked for him during parts of his first two book
projects: Ranch and Full Moon. He also took me up in a Cessna a few
times years ago at the beginning of his exploration of low altitude
aerial photography in the west. That came in handy later when I was
making aerials for The Visionary State. I learned that you could
actually do it and that is wasn't too expensive, especially if you are
renting an aircraft out in the middle of nowhere, like I ended up doing
to make the opening image in The Visionary State of little known Native
American geoglyphs outside Blythe in the Sonoran desert of Southern
California.
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| Sowden House, Hollywood |
RS: How did you get into the The Visionary State project?
MR: I was working on several projects about religion and obscure
ritual subcultures in the west. One of them, Amateur Bullfighting in
California, became a major project for me and I spent about three years
developing a full body of work. I built a book dummy and took it to
Review Santa Fe. Several reviewers gave that work a lot of attention,
and a couple thought they might be able to publish it. My friend Alan
Rapp from Chronicle Books was reviewing work there as well, and Erik
Davis had just recently approached him. Erik had been working on a
traditional history surveying the spiritual landscape of California,
but he was having a hard time giving shape to his project. For part of
his research, he began hitting the road. He fell in love with the
fantastic architecture, ruins, and other traces left in the places
where many spiritual traditions first lay down their hybridized
Californian roots. He realized the places themselves could tell part of
the story, and one day he had a sudden realization that he needed to
find a photographer to partner up with and make it a visual book.
Alan Rapp was a fan of Erik Davis' work, and especially after
seeing my book dummy for Amateur Bullfighting in California, he thought
Erik and I should meet and see what would happen. I was
reluctant at first, I didn't want to abandon my other projects, but I
knew it could be a great collaboration. Erik and I met, did a couple
pilgrimages to freaky sacred sites around the Bay Area, and decided to
work together. We spent about six months building an initial portfolio
and book proposal, and Chronicle accepted it. Everyone at Chronicle,
especially Alan Rapp, was amazingly supportive of the project. The
Visionary State kept getting bigger, and they kept allowing us more
space to fully realize our dream.
RS: On your website, you mention specific categories into which you put
the images you took for The Visionary State. Could you elaborate
on those?
MR: I tried to develop a unifying visual language that created a
familiar landscape for the viewer. I made images with repeating
metaphores of discovery and pilgrimage. Labyrinths, pathways, open
doorways, and building radiating some inner light helped develop the
core language of this portfolio. I wanted the images to be romantic,
contemplative, hyper-real, and timeless, so contemporary signifiers
like automobiles or advertisements were rarely included. I wanted
to avoid making a traditional documentary project, and opted to exclude
any images of people or events. Instead, I populated the book with
icons of California's spirituality. Over a third of the 164 photographs
in the book feature images or statues of saints, gods, goddesses
and gurus. When opportunities arose, I allowed the sites to speak for
themselves by photographing significant texts displayed by the
communities who care for these revered places.
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| Salvation Mountain, Slab City |
RS: Were you interested in this aspect of California before you worked
on this project? What were some of your themes before this
project?
MR: Some of the primary themes I explore in my photography and
installation art address religion, ritual, and unique western
subcultures. I grew up in a religious family and have long explored
various incarnations of the spirit and consciousness. I have several
different projects about ritual subcultures and religion on my website:
Amateur Bullfighting in California, Photographing Guadalupe, and
Reliquary DNA are a few of them. I began a series of artist books
exploring some of the racist underbelly in the romantic old California
Mission museum displays. I have long been a devotee of yoga,
meditation, hot tubs, burning man, Catholic mysticism, ritual, the
desert, the mountains and many other Californian aspects of the book.
RS: Would you consider a similar project in another location—say in another region of the US or in another country?
MR: I'm often asked this question. Though many topics
of the project easily extend to the entire west coast, and though
pockets of spiritual exploration have popped up in different areas of
the U.S. over the ages, there is something inextricably Californian about
they way we approached this history. I don't think it would translate
with the same freaky depth and consistency in other regions. Also, it
was very tiring and expensive work, so for another big project like
this, I've got to find funding sources. A specific exploration of a
non-Californian religious community or site would be compelling for me,
and I am actually talking to another writer about a possible
collaboration in the future.
RS: What future projects do you foresee?
MR: I always have several projects going on, but the top of the
list is strengthening my portrait, editorial and commercial photography
business. Art projects are expensive, so I am trying to mind my
business and take care of some debts. I especially love portrait work
and am doing a lot of commissioned portraits right now.
That said, the call of the open road is irresistable, and I actually
just got back from a retreat and another trip to Salvation Mountain,
featured inside and on the back cover of The Visionary State. I am very
happy with my new work out there and plan to make at least an artist's
book of work about this place.
Since I finished work on The Visionary State, I finished another
project called Photographing Guadalupe, which is about the annual pilgrimage to
Guadalupe's shrine at Tepeyac just north of Mexico City. This shrine is
the largest center of goddess worship in the Western Hemisphere, and
features crushing crowds of millions of devotees and three days of
ecstatic ritual. I recently finished a hand-made book with this work
and posted images and an accompanying essay on my website about this
pilgrimage and the tradition of iconographic devotion.
I have a few other projects in mind as well, but for at least the first
half of the year, I will be working on my business, portraiture, and
Salvation Mountain. I think the Salvation Mountain project could be a
good book.
RS: I look forward to seeing it.
___________________________________________________________
Michael Rauner Photography
http://www.michaelrauner.com
http://www.visionarystate.com
represented by Scott Nichols Gallery
http://www.scottnicholsgallery.com/exhibitions/past/michaelrauner.html
Upcoming exhibitions of Michael Rauner’s photography:
Opening on Jan 13th—March 3
de Saisset Museum
Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA
http://www.scu.edu/desaisset/exhibits/advance.cfm#faith
http://www.artweek.com/previews.shtml
Benefit opening on Jan 18th, otherwise Jan 19—21
Photo LA
w/ Scott Nichol's Gallery
http://www.artfairsinc.com/photola/2007/PLA07_generalinfo.html
http://www.scottnicholsgallery.com/exhibitions/past/michaelrauner.html
Opening Feb 15th—March 31st
Benham Gallery
Seattle, WA
http://www.benhamgallery.com/
Robert A. Schaefer, Jr. is a founding member of
Photoworkshop.com, and has been a fine-art photographer for over 30
years. His work is displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as
well as the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, France. In 1999—2000 he
had a 25-year retrospective of his work at the Huntsville Museum of Art
in Huntsville, Alabama, his home state. His exhibition, Two Sides of
the Coin—which deals with his German family and the Holocaust—was held
at the DeFrog Gallery in Houston, TX in March, April and May as a part
of Fotofest. Two images from this exhibition were recently
purchased by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. He is currently
working on a documentary film about this project and was recently asked
to have a one person exhibition (Nov. 10, 2007 to January 8, 2008) at
the Mongomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, AL, his home state in
2007. Schaefer writes about photography for Double Exposure, Fotophile
Magazine in New York City and The Photo Review in Pennsylvania. He has
taught at The New School and given workshops at Pratt Institute in New
York, and is currently on the faculty at New York University.
Email: rasjrpro@earthlink.net
Website: http://www.schaeferphoto.com
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Last Updated: Feb 4th, 2010 - 13:02:03
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