This image is one of 30 or so pieces that comprise Alastair Whitton's "Patmos and the War at Sea", featuring images from WWII re-shot and developed by the artist, alongside apocalyptic texts in Braille that have been lasered flat and mounted behind glass (so if you "see" by touching something, you're out of luck). The pieces are reminiscent of a book, but the pages are numbered out of sequence, suggesting chaos or a sense of being "outside of time," as war can often feel, especially to those in the throes of it. I was moved by this image of paratroopers dropping on D-Day. Like the blind person trying to read a flat surface, the soldiers at Normandy must have felt a certain sense of "going in blind," eliciting fear, chaos, and probably frustration. In his choices of medium (paper, photography) and subjects (war and the apocalypse), Alastair Whitton pulls together two stark realities - one already, the other not yet - and aligns them in such a way that the viewer, if she gazes rather than glances, will be drawn in to the battle and left to contemplate what it really means to "see."