Worlds Unmasked

CLASS Publishing is honored to share this stimulating, unsettling fine art publication by the father-daughter team of Thomas and Miranda Johnson. Worlds Unmasked takes the reader on "A Journey Through the Plague Years," as seen through the eyes of an emerging visual artists-photographer, then as interpreted by the wordsmithing of a retired university librarian. The 135 haunting black-and-white images are grace-noted with precise and provoking poetry. First the seeing; then the saying what is seen.

As a body of work, capturing the strange dichotomy experienced through Covid—both the alienation of society and the grateful appreciation of self—Worlds Unmasked exposes the isolation, loneliness, and despair of feared illness amidst political, social and economic upheaval, countered by the restorative hope found in the beauty and resilience of nature... and human nature.

Photographer Miranda Johnson skates on the raw edge of the outsider, seeing herself and others, natural and manmade objects, past and present in and around the mountain town of Asheville, North Carolina, and the coastal island of Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Poet Thomas Johnson pins each image to your heart with the economic epiphany of a 17-syllable haiku. Their shared artist gene raises the collection to a level of integration until it is hard to imagine one without the other.

Worlds Unmasked is prefaced by a sensitive foreword by poet Libby Bernardin and photographer Phil Wilkinson, as well as insights by Miranda and Tom on the process and their symbiotic creation. The book has emerged from our collective nightmare as one of the pandemic's rare gifts... to both its readers and the authors themselves.
—Linda Ketron, Editor/Publisher