The collaborative power of poetry and photography in Andrew Zawacki’s Endscape

UGA professor explores a distressed landscape in new interdisciplinary collection

This November Andrew Zawacki, Distinguished Research Professor in the department of English, published Endscape, a collection of his poetry and photography. The work appears in the inaugural edition of the P5 Photo Poetry Pamphlet series, directed by Photoworks.   

Endscape began around 2019, born out of an interest in the landscape surrounding Athens. 

“Endscape is interested in landscape at its Anthropocene tether. It is a landscape under duress. It is also meant to very quietly, very obliquely ask what has ended here? What has been finished here?” Zawacki said. "Originally, I didn’t intend to put them together. I wasn’t writing new poems and thinking ‘this would be great to take some pictures to go with this’.” he said. 

While the poems and photographs in the collection are connected, Zawacki did not want their connections to be straightforward. “The interpretive distance between a picture and a poem being paired ought to put you to work. I don’t want you to read the poem and look at the picture and think the picture illustrates the poem or that the poem is generated from the picture.”

The process of creating Endscape was not the first time Zawacki had been experimenting with both mediums. “It was the first chance I had to make good on this potential energy that I had and to convert it into something kinetic. But I have long been working on the intersection of the photographic image and poetry,” Zawacki said. He is particularly interested in the relationships between poetry and photography, explaining that “photography has allowed me the challenge of pushing the poems further away from the descriptive and objective.” 

In 2013 Zawacki had the opportunity to study in a second discipline, where he spent a year talking classes in the Photography and Extended Media department in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Study in a second discipline allows faculty to take a break from teaching for a year and study to broaden their knowledge. While photography had long been a hobby of Zawacki’s, taking classes in the Dodd photography department allowed him to improve his skills as a photographer. 

“It was a wonderful experience to be an active recipient of all kinds of knowledge. Much of it, unlike poetry, is very hands-on and another thing that I love about photography,” he said. It was important to him to be “treated as a practitioner of photography, not as a poet who made pictures. I wanted the photographs to have to stand on their own.” 

"Publishing Endscape and participating in study in a second discipline embody the notion of what creative research can be like here at UGA," Zawacki said. "I feel partly at the forefront of that, but only because the university, Franklin College, and the English and Photography departments decided that this counts as important. It is an advancement in poetry, photography, and what arts research can look like.” 

The P5 Photo Poetry Pamphlet series began as a venue to support the growing interest in the connection and possibilities of joining poetry and photography into creative works. The pamphlets are published in paperback and available online. Photoworks is a registered charity organization focusing on photography based in England. The P5 series launched in fall 2025 with Zawacki’s Endscape and Vik Shirley’s Persona Digitalia pamphlets.

Image: Andrew Zawacki, author photo.