For the past few years, I've participated in The Light Ekphrastic, a quarterly online journal dedicated to the creation of new written and visual artworks through collaboration between artists. [Ekphrasis: art from writing, writing from art]
For each issue, writers and artists are paired, each creating a new poem, story, photograph, painting or other piece of artwork inspired by work previously submitted by their partner artist. The Light Ekphrastic was founded by editor Jenny O’Grady as a way of inspiring friends who hadn’t written or made art in a while to get back into practice. It has since grown to attract contributors from all over the world, and to include occasional forays into public spaces beyond the web. (Description from https://thelightekphrastic.com/about/)
This has inspired me to experiment with new and extended techniques in both my photography and graphic art. Whereas most of my photographs are spontaneous and inspired by scenes I come upon on the streets, the ekphrastic art for this project is mulled over for weeks or months, with many different photos, superimpositions, collages and video animations tried out until I find the right single artistic representation to go with my partner's poem. In many cases, I'm inspired by more than one of their writing submisisons and I create several different images in respose. Since one one image per project may be submitted in the end, it serves as a good deadline with an ultimate goal of new artistic creations, and achieves the founder's goal of pushing artists to create something new that they would not have done otherwise.
See them in context at The Light Ekphrastic website, under Duggan & ...