Shannon Benine

Mediating the Medium, 2008 – on going

Since 2008, I have combined photography and divination practices to divine greater meaning about the lives of my friends, my family, myself and the universe we inhabit. Taking on the role of psychic medium, the resulting projects use a mixture of photographic techniques to invent new modes of divination while reconnecting the photographic medium to its past relationship with mysticism and modernist experimentation.

As Hugh Dalziel Duncan wrote in Symbols in Society, “Symbols are the instrumentalities whereby people codify experience, or create a ‘map’ of the territory of experience.”

The following are excerpts from the series, “Crystal Visions,” 2008–2009; “Means Without End,” 2008–2014; “Crystal Gazing,” 2012; “The Seers and the Seen,” 2018; and “Astral Visions,” 2019.