‘If It Hadn’t Rained’ is a one-off exhibition by Derry-born artist Michael McGinley, produced by Mary Carson in collaboration with the Willie Carson Collection. Returning to the city that shaped them both, McGinley and Carson present a deeply personal homecoming project rooted in the streets, people and turbulent histories of Derry / Londonderry. The exhibition forms the first part of a proposed multi-phase project exploring the boundaries between the real and the fabricated, the remembered and the constructed.

The project takes as its point of departure the work of Willie Carson, Mary Carson’s father and Michael McGinley’s uncle, a Derry photojournalist whose images from the early 1970s captured the city’s social and political atmosphere with clarity and humanity. These photographs belong to a period when photography carried a stronger claim to truth, grounded in lived encounter, witness and ethical connection between photographer, subject and viewer.

Using Willie Carson’s original negatives alongside material from his own archive, McGinley employs the generative AI platform MidJourney to produce new works that move between archival document, computational image and analogue reconstruction. AI-generated images are re-photographed on medium-format film or realised as dry collodion prints on glass, foregrounding tensions between index, simulation and material trace.

‘If It Hadn’t Rained’ is ultimately about return, memory and the uncertain status of photographic truth in the age of generative image systems. In this unstable territory, images become sites of return and transformation, holding presence and absence within the same frame while asking what it now means for a picture to remember.

Artist Bio:
Michael McGinley is a Derry-born, Manchester-based visual artist working across photography, digital image-making and conceptual installation. His practice is concerned with the contemporary technologies, relations and systems that shape visual culture.

Produced by:
Mary Carson is a Derry-born journalist, documentary and multimedia producer, and the daughter of photojournalist Willie Carson. Her role as co-collaborator and producer brings a personal dimension to the project, as the photographs at its core were made by her father on the streets of the city where she grew up.