About the Photopoetry display

When photography emerged nearly 200 years ago, photographers, writers and publishers were quick to explore how these two forms might complement each other. In the mid-19th century, photographs began to replace engravings in published editions of poets such as Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth. The 20th century saw further collaborations, from the Surrealist Facile, with Man Ray photographs surrounding poems by Paul Eluard (1935) to Remains of Elmet, which pairs Ted Hughes’ verse with Fay Godwin’s black and white landscapes (1979). Today, a wide range of poets and photographers continue to explore the creative possibilities of combining image and text.

Despite the long history of poems and photographs being published together, ‘photopoetry’ has only recently been recognised as a distinct genre. At its simplest, a photograph may illustrate a poem, or lines of poetry might caption a photograph. But photopoetry is most compelling when a more indirect relationship between poem and photograph invites multiple interpretations. Alongside writers, photographers and editors, designers play a crucial role in creating meaningful dialogue between image and text when presented in book form.

David Solo is a passionate collector and enthusiastic photopoetry advocate. For this display, he selected examples that embrace the form and prompt readers to consider how poems and photographs talk to each other. He organised these into three types: works with photographs and poems by a single author; collaborations between photographers and writers; and edited volumes that bring together photography and poetry.

A Difficulty is a Light (Chose Commune, 2024) by Rebecca Norris Webb is an elegy for the artist’s brother in poems and photographs. It includes notes on the many inspirations for both the images and texts. Caleb Femi’s The Wickedest (4th Estate/HarperCollins, 2024) is the story of a night at a famous South London house party with text and images by Femi.

While the book form is intrinsic to all photopoetry publications, in some instances design plays more prominent role. Fleeting Under Light by Diana Guerra (Seaton Street Press, 2024) presents anthotypes (a photographic process using light-sensitive materials from plants) alongside texts, also by Guerra, on various types of paper. The book is concerned with the Latine diaspora and the crossing of borders.

Endscape by Andrew Zawacki and Persona Digitalia by Vik Shirley (both Photoworks, 2025) are the first two publications in a new series of pamphlets called P5, which commissions makers to experiment with combinations of poetry and photography.

Chinese Makars by Robert Crawford and Norman McBeath (Easel Press, 2016) is a book from their long running collaboration and publishing project. The book pairs Crawford’s English and Scots translations of Chinese poems with photographs by McBeath and the 19th-century photographer John Thomson. The book also contains a Photopoetry manifesto, including such declarations as: ‘Poems and photographs encourage each other's obliquity’; ‘Photopoetry is more interesting and engaging when the photograph is not a literal illustration of the poem; likewise, if the poem is not a literal description of the photograph’ and ‘The pairing should be about revealing rather than explaining. This is the key to engaging the reader's imagination.’

McBeath’s vision for photopoetry is also apparent in Plan B (Enitharmon, 2009), which indirectly and evocatively pairs his photographs with the poems by Paul Muldoon. Promesse Du Bonheur by Michael Fried and James Welling (David Zwirner Books, 2016) also involves an assortment of forms and subjects and includes images both made by and selected by Welling in response to and in dialogue with the texts.

Conversely, the text in The Earth Will Come to Laugh and Feast (powerHouse books, 2020) was written by Gabriele Tinti in response to Roger Ballen’s photographs. object amnesic: a compost manifesto by Henrik Strömberg and Jens Soneryd (Blow Up Press, 2021) is part of a long-term collaborative project that looks at ways of being and at objects, structures, and societal institutions. In this book, the text is printed on translucent paper so that it seems to hover over the ghostly images.

Some photopoetry collaborations are the outcomes of particular projects. Home Is Not A Place by Johny Pitts and Roger Robinson (William Collins, 2022) is the result of their exploration of Black Britishness as they travelled around the coastline of the UK recording their impressions. Museum by Paula Meehan and Dragana Jurisic (Dublin City Council, 2019) is a combination of evocative reflections of the history of 14 Henrietta Street, now Dublin’s museum of social history.

In some examples, a poet or photographer may make a selection of historic or contemporary images and text to accompany their work. Dewdrops (everyedition, 2024), which intersperses macro images of dewdrops by Maddel Fuchs with historic Japanese poetry, is a Zen meditation on fragility and patience.

In This Dark Wood by Elisabeth Tonnard (J&L Books, 2013) is a conceptual work which pairs 90 different translations of the first tercet (three lines of verse) from Dante’s Inferno with images from the Joseph Selle archive of solitary individuals on San Francisco streets in the mid-20th century.

For Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 2011), poet Forrest Gander collaborated with the photographers Raymond Meeks, Graciela Iturbide and Lucas Foglia to consider the crossing of borders between cultures, languages, species and forms.

Ensnaring the Moment: On the intersection of poetry and photography by Leah Ollman (Saint Lucy Books, 2025) is an anthology of poems from the 19th century to the present day that describes and comments on individual photographs and the role of photography in society. The book does not include images, but readers might search for – or imagine – them.

The National Art Library holds many of the photography books above. Additional photopoetry works include: