I learned about the Rainier School from a friend in a bar. I learned of how a developmentally disabled resident was treated, living like an animal in a dungeon. I had to find out about this mysterious person. Eventually, I earned the school's trust and equipped with a burdensome 8x10 camera, I began to get to work. Turns out there was no mystery creature locked in a dungeon. They didn't even have a dungeon.
The Rainier School is a state-operated institution for the developmentally disabled, not far from Seattle at the base of beautiful Mount Rainier. The "school" at the Rainier School disappeared years ago. There are no young people. Many of its residents have lived there for their entire lives. They have been betrayed by their minds, and many cases, their bodies. Most of its residents are now elderly, and this extensive campus (complete with a pool, bowling alley, restaurant and its own farm) is now home to only about 370 people, about 20% of its peak capacity.
My objective was to document the final days of a school turned rest home. In a sense, it is a carefully monitored prison. In another, it is a charming country club. Nowadays, as we avoid the institutionalization of the developmentally disabled, the Rainier School and many similar facilities are the victims of our social progress. These images represent the end of a major public commitment and the unique culture it created.
Larrie
Most of the Rainier School was empty and closed off long before I got there. I think other similar institutions have closed completely. But my understanding is that while many would not be sent to a living facility in this day and age, some still need to be. So while institutions may not look like large campuses in the future, I don’t assume they’ll fully disappear.
Summer Dance
Colis
I met many people with disabilities. Some were outgoing, energetic and happy. Others, not so much. I met a few who sadly, seemed to live only in their heads. Everyone had their own characteristics.
Gary
Summer Dance
I had photographed institutionalized people before (Captured Youth). Those teenage incarcerated subjects were not at home, nor did they relate to their state-sponsored environment.
The people in these images saw their living situation as home, which the Rainier School strived to be. So I situated my subjects within the environment, whereas before, I often extracted my subjects, simply photographing them against a black background. Overall, I saw the Rainier School as a positive and supportive living space.
Trygve
Wesley
Bill
Corrina
Dave
John
Fred
I’ve been employed in photography all my adult life, or at least until I retired from The Evergreen State College photo dept. in 2020. I still teach on occasion. My work is in several major museums and I exhibit my work where and when I can.
Since the late 1990s, much of my work has focused on people that are institutionalized or managed by the state. I’m not even sure how that happened, but I have extensively photographed incarcerated male and female youths and adults, the functionally disabled, and of course this work of the intellectually disabled.
Some of my more recent projects include portraits of my covid quarantined neighbors from the spring of 2020, and a collaborative project with an incarcerated man who asked me to photograph the “less fortunate” homeless so that he could then make drawings.
I have also been photographing landscapes of the American west for years. I was planning to visit and photograph a small town in east Texas that my ancestors founded. They were slave owners and I wanted to find out more about what was going on there today. But covid put those plans on hold.