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The magazine of the photo-essay
April 2017 back issue
A Crack in the World
by Barbara Kyne
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“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine.  Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
We are on the precipice of a possible sixth extinction of life on earth. I believe that a lack of empathy for the other – people, plants and animals – is in large part the cause of it. In A Crack in the World, I combine my human vision with the optical limitations I place on the camera, creating a “camera-being” that acts as a species with its own visual perception. My intention is to offer a conduit to an expanded natural world through these sensory artifacts and shake the viewer from a human-centered perspective of the universe. With global warming and nuclear war looming, we need to find solutions for saving the planet. Empathy for each other and the natural world, rather than dominance and greed, could be the imperative first step.
Cosmologists and astrophysicists confidently theorize extra dimensions in which we might be a tiny speck in another universe or parallel to other universes that we can’t perceive. Are there other beings in these universes? Can they perceive us? I imagined peering through and stepping into other dimensions via “a crack in the world.” The sentience of all living entities and our shared consciousness jumps out at me. Orbs pop, and streaks of light dance through the layered dimensions of land and sky. Perception shifts as the small becomes outsize and the distant alive. Whether observing brilliance, darkness or some place in between, these fresh, layered and complex images examine the possibilities in the un-sensed and unimagined. I imagine the blur in the images as sub-atomic particles made visible, representing what is often overlooked, underlying, and even undetected by our five human senses. All images were created from 2013 to 2017 in the five wild acres at the weekend retreat I share with my partner outside of Mariposa, California in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They were made digitally in camera and processed with the usual color and curves adjustments in Photoshop.
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