A Healing Eye: Images and Words in a Time of Plague

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We are living through a very grim time, writes Barry Sheinkopf, with death lurking invisibly all around us, livelihoods shaken or destroyed, emotions running wild in all directions, governments struggling with varying degrees of integrity and success to contain the mayhem, and our very nature as social creatures held in cautious check. We’re calling the microscopic organism that has attacked us Coronavirus and the disease it causes Covid-19, but it’s a plague plain and simple: novel, horrifying, highly contagious, perhaps recurring. Our future has become uncertain, a mystery. That’s why I have subtitled this collection Images and Words in a Time of Plague. I’ve been using cameras for a long time, living with the astonishment of the world around me and trying to capture, not just the facts of what I see, but that very astonishment.

I offer some of those images here–like candles set adrift in a river on paper plates–wedded to insights they have called to mind that poets and writers have left us over many centuries. I offer the book in the hope that it sustains you as these images have sustained me with the faith that the joy of living will endure for us all–that, as Kafka once put it, ‘They threw us out of Paradise, but Paradise was not destroyed.