In 2011, I traveled nearly ten thousand miles around California, to and from places most people have never heard of: Surprise Valley. Lost Hills. Mecca. Along the way I collected scores of stories using simple tools—several medium-format film cameras, a digital recorder, and a stack of notebooks. Real Rural is my medium for sharing those stories with people in urban California and beyond.

This multimedia website is the first of Real Rural’s several forms of storytelling. For six months in 2012, an ad-art campaign on trains throughout the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system featured select portraits of people and places from rural California. In April of that year, Real Rural was featured in Issue #6 of Pop-Up Magazine, the live magazine performance at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall. In 2012-13, I curated an exhibition at the California Historical Society gallery called "I See Beauty in This Life," which paired large-scale Real Rural photographs with vintage photographs of rural California. The show traveled to the Riverside Art Museum, the Merced Multicultural Arts Center, and the Casa de La Guerra in Santa Barbara.

In all these venues, the stories are not about issues, but rather about lives. That’s because Real Rural is meant to start a new conversation, between two parts of California that are at best disconnected, and often at odds. Many people in our cities think they already know the story of rural California: who’s there and how they think, their values and their struggles. I have aimed to demonstrate that in fact this place and its people are far more diverse and dynamic than most of us from outside realize.

Often when people photograph a place that’s unfamiliar, they focus on people who are extraordinary looking, the ones dressed in regalia or covered in tattoos. The people I sought do live remarkable lives, but they are mostly unremarkable in appearance—the kind of people you might pass in the supermarket and not even notice. The idea, then, is to learn about and then reconsider those people, and by extension the place where they live. What has resulted is by no means a comprehensive survey—that would be a life’s work, or more. Instead it is a window onto the vast mosaic that is rural California, evidence of the countless stories out there, waiting to be heard.

Lisa M. Hamilton