Today I want to share a couple of works from a project I’ve been working on. The project is called Poética, a Spanish word for “poetic” or “the art of poetry”. The project name is in Spanish because I’m collaborating with a Spanish friend, Maribel Hernández del Rinón, who is a poet. She’s published a couple of books of her poetry, and she approached me last year about doing a project where we combine some poems from her one of her books, Extraños con Paraguas, with photos from my “catalog” of images from the past few years, stretching back to the beginning of my One a Day Project in 2007.

We spent several months batting around a few concepts on how to approach the project, but nothing seemed quite right. But then last October, we finally hit upon an idea that we really liked. Rather than just having a poem and photo sit side-by-side (e.g. on a wall, or on adjacent pages in a book), we’re creating what we are calling Poética Pictures, each of which incorporate a stanza or two from one of her poems into one of my photos.

Since I don’t speak Spanish, she’s had to explain to me the meaning and emotion of her poetry; she’s also been the one to pick out which of my photos she thinks matches one of her poems. Then, I take the text of the poem and come up with a design that integrates the poem (or piece of the poem) into the photo. Maribel and I meet regularly to make sure that the new Poética Picture that I’ve concocted still matches the mood of her poem and her intent when matching the photo with the poem. Our collaboration over the final designs is quite lively, with many good discussions about art, poetry and the emotional impact of putting text on a photo can make.

BTW, the poems are written in Spanish, but all of our conversations about the Poética Pictures are in German. Maribel and I met in that German class I took last year, and that’s our common language, as she speaks only a bit of English, and I speak even less Spanish. Somehow it seems funny to think that a woman from Spain and a woman from the U.S. would be collaborating on a project with Spanish poetry while talking in German, but it works out well.

It’s actually quite an exciting project for me to try. The task of finding an interesting way to incorporate text into a photo is giving me an intriguing creative challenge to tackle. While I’ve done photography for years, I haven’t before made much “photo-based art”, where I radically change an image from the original colors, which I have done occasionally to get the right “mood” in an image that to match the mood of a poem.  There’s still a lot more I’d like to learn and experiment with in terms of styles and fonts for the text,  though, so we’re still a little ways away from finishing the project, which we’ve been working on part-time since October/November.

However, we have started showing some of the our creations to friends here and there  around the world via Maribel’s Facebook page. But there’s no better place to share it with some more friends around the world than here on the blog. Hope you enjoy this sample of Poética. Feedback is always more than welcome. 🙂

Note: the photos in the post have a © notice in the lower left which is not part of the real design. I put that there today because I’m putting these images on a blog.  We haven’t figured out where exactly we’d really put our signature, so the © notice is a placeholder for that right now.

And no, I can’t translate the poems. If you don’t speak Spanish, well, admire the designs anyway. 😉