eNewMexican

THE FACE OF SURVIVAL

DOCUMENTING CULTURES ON THE EDGE

Spencer Fordin l The New Mexican

There’s urgency in Chris Rainier’s voice and in his call to action. Rainier, a National Geographic Society Explorer, has spent decades traveling the world and documenting cultures that have withstood the pressures of modernity. And he hasn’t been a silent witness; Rainier is the cofounder of The Cultural Sanctuaries Foundation, which aims to give Indigenous societies tools to document their traditions. Now, seven years into that endeavor, Rainier has a message for the world: Climate change is here, and if we don’t act collectively, it might be too late for some of these cultures to survive.

“The message is the idea that it was somewhere over the horizon is no longer true. It’s here,” Rainier says. “What we do in the next 10 to 20 years will define not only the remainder of the 21st century but the way we live on this planet well into the future. Action is required.”

Rainier, who will be speaking and sharing some of his stories on Thursday, June 1, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, has made this existential crisis the focus of his life’s work. The photographer’s most recent published works — Sacred: In Search of Meaning (Mandala Publishing, 2022) and Mask (Earth Aware Editions, 2019) — take images from his travels to diverse civilizations all over the world and celebrate their cultural traditions.

The 64-year-old documentarian was born in Canada but quickly became a world traveler — his dad had a job that moved the family to Australia, Africa, England, and the U.S. during his youth. As a result, Rainier had already developed an interest in photography and cultural anthropology well before it became his profession. He began as a war correspondent, covering conflicts in locations such as Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Iraq.

Rainier also photographed the aftermath of 9/11 in Manhattan as well as the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, and he credits his mid-career shift to working for National Geographic with developing his focus.

For 20 years, he says, he worked in National Geographic’s research and educational division, where he ran a program empowering

Renowned documentary photographer Chris Rainier’s work is fueled by his passion for preservation

Indigenous storytellers to document their cultures. That took him to remote locations in Africa, South America, and Asia, and he started to understand that many of these societies had the same adversary in common.

“What sort of evolved out of that was a realization that there was very little being done in that climate change space,” Rainier says. “We realized there was a tremendous amount of traditional knowledge there. Today, we work in hot spots around the world, hot spots of where the climate impact is really being felt; in the Pacific Ocean, where there are communities that are being forced to move because of rising oceans. And desertification, we work in Mongolia where grasslands are crucial to the re-oxygenation of the planet.”

Rainier’s Cultural Sanctuaries Foundation, founded in 2016, has already developed multiple conservation projects.

The first one, ratified by the Bhutan government in 2018, enables the country’s oldest indigenous community, the Olep of Rukha, to continue living off the land. The foundation completed a dictionary of the Olep language and a full survey of the Olep culture. Further projects are under way in Mexico, Mongolia, Brazil, and Ecuador, and the Cultural Sanctuaries Foundation is exploring future endeavors in Japan, Peru, and New Guinea.

Everywhere they go, Rainier says, they aim to give people a better understanding of the many ways in which societies shape themselves.

“It’s a dual process,” Rainier says. “I am photographing what I feel are cultures that are on the edge that I feel we need to document their traditional knowledge and culture. But I also feel we need to have them participate in being a part of that process. Many cultures want to do that. They’re watching their elders die away with their traditional languages and traditional culture, and they want to preserve that and amplify it for future generations.”

Rainier, who was the last assistant to famed photographer Ansel Adams, says that we’re fortunate to be in a time of great technological advancement.

He speaks glowingly of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is allowing scientists to gaze back at the origins of the universe. And he, unlike many other photographers, doesn’t feel threatened by the age of digital tools that allow untrained eyes to produce masterful images.

Rainier says that’s ultimately good for society, adding that Adams was also an early proponent of advanced technology.

“He died in 1984, but he had a chance to sit down with Steve Jobs and really express his passion about photography,” Rainier says of the meeting between those rare minds. “Steve Jobs was very young at that point, and I was lucky to be in the room listening to both of them. I would love to have a time machine and bring Steve Jobs as well as Ansel Adams to see today, when six billion images are downloaded and uploaded to the worldwide web every day. I think photography has become not only digitized but has become a profound language in our daily lives globally.”

As you might imagine, Rainier is running out of bucket list places to visit — and while there are places he hasn’t been to yet, there are still many sacred spaces he hopes to document. But if you ask him the one place he’d still like to photograph, his answer is out of this world.

“I’m determined to get to space with my son,” he says. “I want to be able to look out of that space station window and photograph the planet as this kind of biosphere and truly have that cathartic experience that so many astronauts have had of realizing how fragile this small little planet is in the universe spinning out there. That’s the final image I hope to take.”

Rainier hopes to entertain as well as educate during his appearance at the Lensic, and ultimately, he wants to stimulate people’s imaginations on life’s biggest subjects: What do we all find sacred? And what is the common ground that bridges societies and cultural traditions around the globe?

He has spoken in cities throughout the world, but Santa Fe is special — he lives here when he isn’t traveling. Rainier has upcoming National Geographic outings to Antarctica and across the Pacific Ocean, and his evening at the Lensic is flanked by closedcircuit performances from the National Theatre in London and The Metropolitan Opera in New York. But it’s here that he finds the best audiences. “It’s culture, and it comes here to Santa Fe,” says Rainier. “I love the Lensic because I’ve sat in there with traditional folk music from the middle of the Sahara to Flamenco to classical music.

“It all comes through our door in Santa Fe, and I’m really humbled and I’m very honored and I’m very excited to share with the community some of the thoughts and feelings and images I’ve collected along the way.” ◀

Chris Rainier: Cultures on the Edge

7:30 p.m., Thursday, June 1

Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St. $10

505-988-1234; lensic.org or culturalsanctuaries.org

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2023-05-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-05-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://enewmexican.com/article/281887302680146

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