Honouring the visual legacy of Derry legend Willie Carson
Mary Carson and Michael McGinley present a deeply personal project rooted in the photographs of their father and uncle
Derry born artist and documentary and multimedia producer, Michael McGinley and Mary Carson bring If It Hadn't Rained to the city that shaped them both - for a one-off, homecoming exhibition from May 28 - 30.
The show is a deeply personal project rooted in the streets, people, and turbulent history of their shared hometown and part one of a multiphase project in the city, exploring the boundaries between the real and the fabricated, the remembered and the constructed.
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.
Carson's photographs belong to a time when photography carried an implicit claim to truth. Born of real encounters and human vulnerability, they do not simply record events — they establish a visual and emotional connection to a place and a past. They carry ethical weight: between photographer, subject, and viewer.
Working with original photographic negatives from the Willie Carson Collection and some of his own work, McGinley employs a recursive photographic process - combining the generative AI platform MidJourney with photographic re-stagings in real life - 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, images become sites of return and transformation - holding presence and absence in the same frame, questioning what it now means for a picture to remember. The exhibition asks how both memory and photography are being redefined in the digital age, and insists on another responsibility of the image that precedes politics: to help humans encounter themselves.
Michael McGinley is a Derry born, Manchester-based visual artist whose practice spans photography, digital image-making, and conceptual installation. His work is concerned with the the contemporary technology, relations and systems which shape our visual culture.
Willie Carson was an iconic Derry photojournalist and author whose lens documented the social and political upheavals of the early 1970s. His archive is a testament to the power of photography as an act of witness and a record of shared humanity.
The exhibition will take place at Unit 12, Gortfoyle Business Centre, located at 104-108 Spencer Road, Derry. The opening reception is scheduled for May 28 from 6.30pm to 8.30pm, with subsequent public viewing hours held from 10,00am to 4.00pm on May 29 and 30.
Admission to the gallery is free to the public, and all are welcome to attend this landmark homecoming event.