Where Masks Still Dance: New Guinea
There is ethnographic documentation and then there is ethnographic documentation. Rainier is a photographer as artful as any ever born. His photos of the tribal peoples of New Guinea, especially in their ceremonial garb, are as consciously and deliberately beautiful as the photographs of poor Americans by Ben Shahn and Helen Leavitt that they often resemble in composition. Unlike the work of those artists of the Depression era and its aftermath, Rainier's photos are intensely still rather than kinetic, as if consciously posed rather than caught on the fly. Rainier's obsession with detail is as fine lined as any Pre-Raphaelite painter's and as dramatically lit (the range of grays in his monochrome images is richly broad), in those aspects recalling fellow photographer Joel Peter Witkin's pictures of gruesome medical pathology phenomena. Sometimes the masks and body piercings and paintings of his subjects are as disquieting as Witkin's imagery, but only momentarily, for Rainier visibly loves and cherishes the New Guineans and their cultures. Once seen, manyof these images may haunt you forever, returning in dreams, welcomely.Ray Olson