Sky Diaries + Black Box

Flying in airplanes has become for many nearly as normal as getting into a car used to be in the last century. International travel-for business, pleasure, or strategic governmental planning- is now ordinary. The series of collage photos from 2009, entitled "Sky Diaries"was inspired my father's experience as a pilot in WWII. The "Black Box" is reacting to interruptions of air travel in our recent history: specifically the tragic airplane crash of Poland's top political representatives, and the natural disaster that caused air havoc around the world for two weeks with the eruption of the volcano in Iceland. War raises issues of control and discipline, propaganda and education, culture shock and cultivation of new experiences, evil and good. International air travel brings us to think about privilege, an increasingly fast-paced lifestyle, multiculturalism and globalization. The so called "black box" in an airplane holds the secrets to the destruction of the craft, often with the pilot's last recorded words. It is the moment before death when we are at last confronted

with our own mortality, and not the loss of our luggage, or loss of a war.

Barbara Benish

šumava, CZ / California