The result of a long collaboration with artist Emma Ronay, Breathing Under Water is a collection of poems and photographs in conversation with each other. Over a couple of years, Emma regularly sent me a photograph which I responded to with text. Emma’s photographs covered a wide range of subjects, but this collection concentrates on our work responding to her images of water – mainly the surface of the Thames.
I would study each image closely, then try to write something very rapidly in response – almost like a verbal camera shutter. Emma’s photographs have so much space in them for the imagination to take root. The patterns, abstractions and ghosts that emerge from the photographs sneak into the text and in return, the text gives another thought or pattern to the image.
See the collection here:
BreathingUnderWater
Image by Emma Ronay
sl grange 