If It hadn't Rained
Date: 28 May 2026 - 30 May 2026
Venue: Gortfoyle Business Centre, 104-108 Spencer Road, Waterside, Derry, Derry, BT47 6AG
If It Hadn't Rained, a meditation on memory, belief and the shifting nature of photographic truth. Admission is Free
Artist Michael McGinley and producer Mary Carson bring If It Hadn't Rained to Derry/Londonderry — the city that shaped them both — for a one-off, homecoming exhibition.
If It Hadn't Rained is a meditation on memory, belief, and the shifting nature of photographic truth. The project takes as its point of origin the work of Willie Carson — Mary's father and Michael's uncle, a Derry photojournalist whose images from the early 1970s captured the city's intense social and political atmosphere with unflinching humanity.
Working with Carson's original photographic negatives, McGinley employs a recursive photographic process — combining the generative imaging platform MidJourney with photographic re-stagings — to produce a new body of work. The project confronts photography's current crisis as a generative hybrid form, exploring the convergence between human recollection and machine generation: both remake the past from fragments, one through lived experience, the other through vast datasets.
In this unstable zone, the exhibition asks how both memory and photography are being redefined in the digital age.