Photoworks started a great new venture in 2025 in an attempt to continue the dialogue between photography and poetry, in the form of the P5 Photo Poetry Pamphlet Series. As it stated on its website: “photography and poetry have been in dialogue since the earliest days of the camera… Yet despite nearly 200 years of such work and many stand out examples, photo-poetry has not been widely recognized as a distinct genre.”
Four artists were selected; 2 for 2025 and 2 for the spring of 2026 and one of the artists selected for the series was Vik Shirley and her project Persona Digitalia.
Vik Shirley is a poet based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Shirley’s photo poetry is a hyper-focused, obsessive play with fragmentation, time shifts, the multiple selves and the intensity of life through colour, aesthetic and the lens of the neurodivergent mind.
Persona Digitalia is a book of pairs, two versions of a treated and duplicated image, each housed in its own grid. As Shirley describes: “one grid so tight that no trace of the subject is visible. The other more wound out and revealing.”
This conceptual project is colourful, consistent in its delivery; whereby the poetry itself matches the imagery in term of layout, and is refreshingly concise.
The poetry that accompanies the images, at the bottom of each page is clear and has a serene aspect to it, especially when describing various industrial locations. This aspect she hands to the reader so eloquently and bravo to her for making that work look so easy, as the language is careful but deliberate.
At the same time there is a playful, psychedelic aspect to the writing: “open wider | the aqua | ghost-wheel infinity | poloroid blue | mechanical workings…” Interestingly lines like this become more vivid in the mind than the imagery that accompanies and this is what makes the entire work so beautifully assembled.
There is an interesting way that she uses her poetry to speak to different aspects of basically the same picture. The more zoomed-out gridded images of the left pages are described in a way, objectively. The poem can focus on the facade, the outer-elements. Whereas the zoomed-in image on the right pages is in a way subjective; more personal. There are references to the self in many aspects. This is how she describes “having you cake and eating it too.” Looking at the same image two different ways, it offers completely different contexts and resultingly, two different sets of feelings, viewpoints, values, aesthetics, and more.
The images were taken in various locations in Edinburgh, Los Angeles, Glasgow, Bristol and Seattle.
ISBN: 978-1-9192612-1-8
The book is available from: photoworks.org.uk
This is fantastic. I love and appreciate the whole photo-poetry genre and marriage, and have practiced it regularly. I wrote an entire collection of poems in response to and in correspondence with Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” series and had a blast doing so. I even contacted Sherman’s representatives, with the hopes of creating a book that featured her photos with the poems, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Thanks for sharing this!
You are welcome sir.