In despite of what is going on in the world today there is still Beauty
As a young, aspiring photographer and filmmaker, Dale Collins walked the streets of Bristol in the 1990s, camera in hand, drawn to the markings left behind by the graffiti artist known as Vermin. In alleyways and forgotten corners of the city, Dale documented an artist whose work carried raw poetry — urgent, defiant, and unfiltered — speaking from the edges of lived experience.
Both artists were later sectioned at St Lawrence’s Hospital in the UK. Dale found his way back to the outside world after six weeks. Vermin did not. He remains incarcerated to this day.
Time and distance did not end the conversation. Through letters smuggled with tenderness, and drawings sent from behind locked doors, the work continues to travel. Dale carries it now — a custodian of a voice that refuses to disappear. What began on the streets has become an act of witness: a promise to ensure that Vermin’s words, lines, and visions reach beyond the walls that still hold him, and into the world where they belong.
