For my final project, I created three digital photo collages that illustrate Walter de la Mare’s poem “The Listeners.” In the poem, Mare describes a Traveller going to a small house in the woods at night, where he is met with the silence and presence of the “listeners”. The poem is very mysterious, as the Traveller questions who these Listeners are and why the house he has traveled to is now empty. Through my digital photo collages, I wanted to capture this mysterious quality and create visuals depicting the imagery of the Traveller, the Listeners, the woods, and the small house.
To make the photo collages, I collected many different photographs that depicted various aspects of the poem and layered, blurred, and changed the opacity of them to create a mysterious scene. I also handwrote the poem and layered my writing into the photo colleges, to showcase some of the poem’s actual text. I created three different photo collages, that can be viewed together as a small collection. Each one depicts the poem and showcases its imagery slightly differently. The first photo collage puts the viewer into the scene, for it feels the most immersive and realistic out of the three. The second and third pieces incorporate more of the written-out text, as I used my writing as a background for the various collages I made. This approach is less immersive in the scene but creates more of a direct correlation between the text and the visual photo collages. These two collages also mimic the feeling of imagery coming to life as the poem is read, for the visuals seem to emerge from the written-out text.
