Lisa Carletta is a Fashion Photographer and Digital Media Artist splitting her time between London, Brussels and Milan. In 2017, she completed a Master in Fine Art at Royal College of Art, London.
Carletta’s practice is characterised as consisting of a combination of photography, digital media and post production techniques to investigate ideas of the private, virtual and idealised self. Recurring themes in Carletta’s work are often taken from her personal life, in which memories of her own experiences take a central role. In doing so, she creates images that are whimsical and colorful, that simultaneously reveal common human insecurities and anxieties. Lisa’s work fabricates a fantasy world where nothing is what it seems.
She collaborated with great artists such as Stromae, Selah Sue, Mathias Malzieu, Rossy de Palma, Christine & the Queens, Emilie Simon, Diane Pernet, Vitalic and many others.
How did you learn your craft and when did you decide to focus on character and storytelling?
I’m a self-taught photographer, I’ve always been curious about people and things surrounding me. Also I’ve always been inspired by cinema. I think since the beginning of my career, I always wanted to tell stories, about people, how they live, what they do… and I guess that’s how I started – without really thinking about it – doing my kind of photography.
How are your ideas born?
Most of my ideas come from the most mundane scenes of everyday life. It’s like as a slice of life that I imagined first and recreated as I’ve seen it. As as said previously cinema has been a big inspiration.
You work in various sectors including editorial, commissions, celebrities and fine art yet you still retain a unique style. How do you manage to switch between projects ensuring they meet the brief and yet keep true to your voice?
Concerning my editorial and Fine art projects, I’m always alone to bring all concepts and ideas, so it’s easy for me to stay true to my voice. Then while working on commissions or collaborating with celebrities, I always do my best to understand their personalities and what they like or expect from me to finally propose something in the crossroads of our universe. I want them to be happy but I need to be happy too with the project. And there is always a way to reunite different worlds.
Are you influenced by any other artists if so who and why?
I’ve always had a huge admiration of artists such as Tim Walker, Guy Bourdin, Erwin Olaf, Gregory Crewdson, Philipp-Lorca diCorcia, Sophie Calle, Jeff Wall, Wes Anderson, Stanley Kubrick… they are visually very inspiring to me. They all have this little magic to bring fantasy into reality, combining truth and fiction with poetry and a delicate sense of details.
How do decide on locations and the design for your shoots?
It depends, sometimes I have a precise idea of a story in mind and I need to find a specific location that fit to it, and some other times It’s a location that I have seen that inspires me a new story to shoot.
Can you tell us more about your series The Ordinary Life of Alison Martinu and Just a Few Clouds Between Us?
The Ordinary life of Alison Martinu is a series portraying the everyday life of Alison, a suburban cross-dresser living in Newcastle. These pictures are more than a temporary escape, they are testimony to the self-creation of identity.
Cross-dressers like Alison might have remained overlooked as they usually perform for themselves. I have found interesting to reflect the ordinariness and duality of their life, demonstrating there are also other forms of transgenderism.
Just a few clouds between us is a sort of ‘autobiographical’ series, it was inspired from my childhood fears that reemerged when I first moved to London. I’ve captured these special moments of transition in my life, staging these mixed feeling of excitation and discovery but also loneliness, apprehension and insecurities while being new in a city. The little girl represented my own appearance at that time and I portrayed her in East London where I used to live.
You work with numerous celebrities and the outcome is often quirky, humorous and exceptionally unique portraits. Can you talk us through the process of bringing both their personality and your concepts together?
Before meeting each of the celebrities I had the chance to portray, I had been making research to understand what kind of things they like, it helps me to understand what they might accept to do. And then it’s the same process than for my other images, I imagine a situation with a character, a role they could play – close to their own personality. Always doing my best to combine their world and mine.
As well as photography you have worked with animation. In Paradise found you tackle the blurred line between virtuality and reality can you tell us more about this?
Paradise Found is a project I worked on during my master in Fine Art at Royal College of Art, London, about the disintegration and reconstruction of the self, the identity, the body and the digital self. Highlighting the way we represent ourselves in the digital realm and how it might impact our behaviour and the shaping of our persona. I created a virtual surrogate to portray a life mediated by technology and played on this blurred line between virtuality and reality, creating an idealized version of myself, a digital replica built from scratch and composed by many parts of other bodies; potentially this future and single online identity. A reborn in the digital realm.
My interests were mostly focused on the idea of enhancement, the notion of perfection and the quick shift beauty and technology have been through.
What has been the biggest challenge of your career to date?
In 2015 I decided to have a break in my professional career to enrol in the 2 years Master in Fine Art at Royal College of Art in London.
This was a very big challenge, it was like restarting from zero. When you work in the fashion industry, everything goes fast and you don’t really have time to work very deeply all your ideas and concepts. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do during the MA, take the time to research, go deeper and add layers in my work.
Work wise, the animation was a huge challenge, as I had no knowledge or experience with 3D animation at all. I had to learn very quickly different softwares as Maya, ZBrush, EU4, but also how to use Logic and Premiere as it was my first moving image project too. I was lucky to be helped by technicians from Royal College to understand how to animate the character, but I had to do most of the things alone.
What work can we see in near future from you?
I recently directed a fashion film ‘I want nothing but looking at you’ that has been selected to a few festivals; Fashion Film Festival Milano, Miami Fashion Film Festival, Video Art and experimental Film Festival NY and Fashion Film Festival Istanbul. They were all screening it this week (7-10 November), except Miami that is happening on 17-18 January 2020.
Also I’m a finalist of PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant with my series ‘The ordinary life of Alison Martinu’ and it will be shown at BASE in Milan during the PhotoVogue Festival (14-17 November).
