Final Project Proposal: The Bridge Between Poetry and Photography

For my final project, I’d like to focus on creating a connection between my poetry and photography. Poetry has come to be a very big part of my life in the past few years, as photography has been for a long time. However, I have never bridged the gap between the two to create unification. I want to intertwine my literary art and visual art to create a more wholesome, completed project. I’ve thought about a number of different ways to do this. I considered writing poems inspired by photographs, but I think that would almost be like working backwards. So I have selected a few poems, written in the past three years, that I want to focus on to create visual representation for. Many of the poems I plan to focus my attention on are among the group that I read at the Undergraduate Research Conference last spring.

    I can’t say exactly how the final project will turn out right now - whether it will be a cohesive project that branches across multiple poems, separated groups of photos for each individual poem, or simply just come to focus on one single poem. It will require a lot of time and exploration. I plan to bounce between literal and figurative/symbolic depictions of the poems, but will eventually narrow it down to one approach in order to have a unified group of photos. I want to play with focus - don’t be surprised if the final photos are all blurred abstractions. These photos may or may not involve use of the figure. I don’t think it will be all of either side - the final group will most likely have a mix of some photos with and without figures.

My primary goal is to capture the essence of the poem, the heart of its tone and emotion that inspired me to write it in the first place. Visually and accurately portraying the imagery within the poems is not as important to me. That being said, as mentioned before, I still intend to play with the exploration of literal visual depictions for at least some of the poems that do focus more on visuals. I think it’s a necessary path I need to take in order to come at this project from all angles before settling on one final approach.

Light will of course play a huge roll in the creation of these photos. I plan to use different lighting situations as one of the primary methods to portray emotion and tone in the photographs. Once again, this will require some exploration both with artificial studio lights, and the utilization and manipulation of natural light. But all photos will be very conscious and decisive in the use of light within the frame.