For Austin, Texas, musician, writer and photographer Philip Anderson Edsel (@edsel), the relationship between words and visuals has always been fluid. “When I see a powerful photo, I feel inspired to write,” he says. “It sparks a particular memory or even an imaginary scene that I want to describe.”
After bringing his own photos to life through vivid captions with lines such as “wild wind threshed through cotton shirts,” and “faithful soldiers of the season’s end,” he even challenged himself to write a "photo-novel" on Instagram during last year’s National Novel Writing Month. Through his writing, Philip discovered a like-minded community of people eager to pair words and images in new ways. And with that, he decided to connect these writers to one another, challenging them to add creative captions to their visual work.
“I write more free-prose, but I’ve seen Shakespearean sonnets in iambic pentameter, haikus — everything really,” he says. “The challenge for me is to write short and simple pieces that feel sentimental and honest and raw.”
Photo by @edsel