Carlotta Cardana on Her Editorial Works

Editorial photographer, Carlotta Cardana gave a talk to students today about how her practice has developed over time, and how she has utilised her personal, artistic projects to gain commissioned work. Starting her career, Carlotta studied the commercial side of photography in Italy, and then went on to travel to numerous countries such as Argentina and Mexico, searching for new projects.

Her ambition was to create editorial work, Carlotta would inform her practice by going into shops to see what type of images were being used in magazines to reach this goal. Based in London for the last decade, she has been working on a project that focused on photographing couples. This started out by photographing people in London that looked part of the Mod subculture. She would attend Mod events to find contacts which ended up being mostly couples, ultimately transforming the project into looking at the relationship they would have with each other through body language. Done so by finding hints in their gestures to one another and by creating an atmosphere of ‘awkward silence’ to encourage to couples to come together and rely on each other.

The project showcasing the images was exhibited at Nooderlicht Photofestival (2014) in the Netherlands and also in the south of France where the work was displayed above the windows of a train station. As the portraits were taken in the style Carlotta enjoyed doing, using natural light and showing the environment around the models, it led to her getting editorial commissions from magazines to create work in the same style in a commercial context and also gaining commissions to photograph interiors of buildings because of this environmental portraiture style.

Since 2013, Carlotta has been working on the Red Road Project (https://redroadproject.com/) which has used her way of photographing people and environments to share the stories of Native Americans as a form of positive representation. The website showcasing the work of the project and with the aid of archival imagery acts a resource for education on Native American culture. It is organised by relevant topics and case studies relating to the project.