This is how the concept photopoetry was born

In 2016, after I’ve lost my dear grandfather, I started handwriting each day a poem, documenting how I feel, and trying to find ways to capture it in a photograph. This is how the concept photopoetry was born.

Daciana Lipai Turning Black into Color Book 366 handwritten poems

photography & poems 2021 © DACIANA LIPAI ~ Turning Black into Color

366 little handwritten poem notes, stand behind the book, Turning Black into Color. 366 days of documenting each day, a journey through grief, after losing a dear one. 366 days of photopoems, combining each day a poem with photography.

When you lose a loved one, it can feel like your whole world is breaking apart. This is how I felt. I started questioning everything in my life, trying to answer the question:

When you lose a loved one, where does all the love go?

I started a daily challenge project, creating a photopoem each day. I would handwrite the poem on a piece of paper and conceptualized it into photography.

In order to heal the broken heart, you have to channel all your energy into making something out of the grief.

So many times I hear the question, “Where do you get your inspiration from”. I know, these days, it is hard not to search for inspiration from other’s work and one big challenge is not to share your work.

Inspiration always has to come from inside. It is your message, your vision. Through art, you put a part of yourself into the world. How you experience life. It is a very vulnerable place to be in, especially when you talk about sensitive subjects like grief, death, fear, mourning, that everybody experiences and can relate to, in one way or another, but many of the people choose to deny the grief that makes us so fragile.

The lockdown made me realize the importance of this project. I can understand the one that is standing in that place, lost, lonely, and brokenhearted. I realized that physical isolation can never take away our emotional connection and the true essence of our being.