About the Cover

Cover image: "Land of Oz", (c) Johnny Joo, date taken: 9/22/2015

The cover image for this issue of postmedieval was taken by Johnny Joo, a photographer who focuses on abandoned urban landscapes and buildings. This particular photograph was taken at The Land of Oz, a theme park located in Beech Mountain, North Carolina. The park opened in 1970, and while it closed just ten years later, it reopened to the public in 1991 for a brief festival and has, since then, opened its doors for special events. I chose this image for the cover of this issue as a nod both to the Wizard of Oz allusion in the volume’s title, but also as a way of encouraging reflection on the volume’s theme of world-building. The park is, in so many ways, a perfect example of the impulse to make and remake imagined worlds, and to elide them with the purported ‘real.’ It is also a testament to the simultaneously ephemeral and enduring nature of sub-creations, which is something that Joo captures beautifully in his eerie and atmospheric images of the park.