There is a photograph I took many years ago while still in school of my dog Luke, sitting in the middle of the road, while a patrol car approaches in the distance. It was an ordinary moment for the most part, that anyone could have seen or missed. Nothing terribly notable, perhaps just a view that posed more questions than it answered. It was shot mid-day, the worst time to take pictures generally, but the result resonated with me for some reason and I kept it, framed, on and off, many walls since. After four decades of trying to do just that again, that is, resonate with the view at hand, looking for that thing, the it, hiding inside the ordinary, I find myself precisely here, still awaiting, hoping, for another “decisive moment,” as Bresson called it. I like that phrase so much. The decisive moment, the signature trait of impermanence. The possibility of capturing a moment that might contain answers to questions you’ve not yet thought to ask. A visual metaphor, seeing for seeing’s sake. I always find that profound…
Now, after some more years and now, having become a husband and a father, the tools I use have strangely morphed, and I find myself writing as much or more than composing photographs. They are, these words too, in themselves mostly unremarkable, but also set in a truly dramatic context, much like that photograph. How does one prepare another for a world such as this?
I began writing letters to my son Will, since before he could hear my voice, long before he could read or even had a name, asking aloud, just that. He is the son now, that I aspire to father. That is that I have always aspired to father. Better than my own father. He, my son, growing quietly, steadily, first inside my wife, and then bursting out and into the world, all the while, while I work at these mysteries, trying, struggling to find the right words and paths, and then articulate what it means to walk them. To be a decent man. A good father. A loving husband. A fellow student of this life.
That was eight years ago and I’m still searching. Still learning. Still writing. What began as something private — devotional — has since, become the most important work of my life. Not because fatherhood is sentimental, but because it isn’t. Because loving, really loving, forces one to examine everything you thought you believed. Every myth you’ve created and told yourself, about yourself. Can I tell the truth of who I am, really? Dare I say the such things out loud? Do my morals, my religion or lack of one, my politics, do these stand up to scrutiny? What kind of legacy can I really offer? What does it mean to be a good man- to live deliberately, honestly, in a world that’s been optimized for distraction and duplicity?
These letters, I hope, might help him. Perhaps they’ll help me. They are philosophical in a way that honest things tend to be. They don’t really offer answers, only occasionally, when inspired, simply ask more useful questions.
I don’t pretend to be a guru or someone so enlightened that my words should be enshrined, but I neither pretend to have forgotten the astonishing experiences I have so readily collected, and the value of having survived them. Stories, some so ridiculous, I shy from repeating them, less they be thought of as embellished. In my life so far I’ve played many roles. A soldier, a student, a grieving son, a lost cause. I was an advertising photographer, a director, an artist for more than twenty-five years. I worked hard to help create an arts district in an area known as Roosevelt Row, where, in the late nineties I built rent controlled affordable housing specifically for other artists to help invigorate my home town. I was an early explorer in something that years later became known as co-working. I spent many years building a career on the idea that imagery and artwork could tell the truth about a place and the people in it, and that work taught me something I carry into every sentence I write -that the most important lessons are at first almost always disguised as something else, and what matters most is perspective. How to be a good witness. The job, the trick, for me, has been to find and articulate a point of view, and hold it up in a way so that someone else can see what magic I’ve found, too, even for a moment, for themselves. To really see it.
That’s what I’m trying for here.
WayneRainey.com is going to be the home for some letters, musings, essays, some photos and videos and the work I’m building around them — including a weekly Substack, a journal for people who might want to write their own story and the lessons they’ve learned into the record. It is at times, a deeply personal and revealing endeavor. It’s not for everyone, alas it is after-all first and foremost, a love letter to my son.
But if any of this feels familiar — if you’ve ever cared about someone so much, it made you strain to find better words, better ways — you’ve found common ground here. I hope the spirit of love and hope from which it was written with, resonates with you.
Wayne Rainey
