Mt. Vernon Staircase / Melissa Wyse & Tim Peck

Last year, I started working on a collaborative photography project.  I’ve been taking photos on an old Pentax SLR camera, and my partner, Tim, has been going into the dark room to develop the film.  Tim is a professional musician and composer, and so for both of us this has been a fun creative enterprise, an opportunity to experiment in a third medium while we complete major projects in our primary fields.

So far, my favorite photos from our series are the ones I’ve taken in my neighborhood in Baltimore.  One of the interesting elements of the collaboration has been that Tim never knows what will be on the film I send him, and I don’t know how he’ll choose to interpret the images once he gets them in the darkroom.  It can be a freeing experience — especially as a writer, where so little of my creative work is open to that kind of collaborative serendipity.  I really like the painterly effect we wound up with in Mt. Vernon Staircase.