# An introduction about the collaboration

A few weeks I ago I mentioned it would be cool for @raj808 and I to do a collaboration between his poetry and my photography - we will be meeting soon in Kraków, and who knows, I thought, maybe we could make something there as we're both artists?

Thanks to his assignment for @sndbox this month 'collaboration' happened even sooner than I though. Via Discord he asked me if I wanted to collab with him, and if yes, if I were able to give him a theme via photographs, to which he would respond with poetry.

After that we could also do the other way around: he would provide me with poetry, to which I would find photography. We brainstormed a bit more over chat and decided how we wanted to continue soon enough. It all sounded fun and interesting to me, and so we started!

Picking the visual theme

I didn't know in words what I wanted to present to @raj808, but I remember a poet recently mention to me that my Urbex photography inspired her, things like cracks in walls. I love Urbex, I love the poetic nature of most of these posts, and I thought I could probably find a small sub-series of one of those Urbex projects to share with @raj808.

I went through a series of photos I made in an abandoned prison in Estonia, and tried to find a theme, a subject. I noticed I had quite some pictures with text or traces of 'messages' in them, and it triggered me: would the poet start writing about words, writing meta poetry in a way, if he saw text? Or would he notice something entirely different and focus on a detail I didn't even see in my own pictures? Would he write about Maria, because Maria was the only text readable in English, the rest of the visible texts in the photos written in Cyrillic?

I found a series of 5 pictures, with a newspaper, a book, a message on a board, posters on a wall, an old calendar, and edited them in a way that enhanced their 'dusty' feel. I sent them to @raj808, and decided to not share a title or theme in words with him in addition, since I felt like I didn't want to steer him more than I would already steer him with the photographs.

I was really really curious what he would come up with. And wanted to let the photographs do their work.

Editing photo series

For me, editing is the part where a story comes alive. I often make series of shots and 'present' a certain story after looking through them, dismissing most, and editing a select few that I feel are representing my experience or telling the story I want to share.

But often, more sub-stories are present in these series, sub-stories of pictures I didn't select before, got ignored, are gathering dust on the harddisk.

This is one of those cases. The 5 pictures I present here have never been published before since I didn't put them in my primary selection of edits of the prison shoot. But now I've turned them into a series, and even more, had a fellow artist add poetry to them, they suddenly became something of meaning, a forgotten story now finally told.

Thank you @raj808 for making that possible. Your poetry was a positive surprize to me, a story of a grandmother, all grandmothers maybe, a passing of time. I find it beautiful. It's sort of calming to read a poem where every sentence starts with the same words - something to look forward to, and something to connect it al with.

The final result - a photo poem

Check out the work of @raj808

@raj808 will write a post about his experience of our collaboration as well, which might be an interesting mirror to my post about my part of the process. I hope he will plug his link here so you can all read it - and when I receive the link I'll edit this post to include it.

For me working with fellow artists is something I want to develop further. The amount of talent and diversity on this Blockchain is amazing and something to cherish. Thanks @raj808 for your willingness to collaborate with me this past week!

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