Guest Speaker 16- Carlotta Cardana
Carlotta is an Italian photographer living in London. Her work is editorial and commercial.
At the start of her career, she didn’t know how to create or develop a story so she looked at the edit of her work and this helped her to develop editorial and commercial work.
Among the other projects she has done, I found “Kabukicho Nights” to be most interesting where she photographed men in Tokyo who have had plastic surgery to look like pop stars and conform to the cultural ‘cuteness’. I think it’s interesting and very important to explore different cultures in photography, especially editorial and documentary.
She also mentioned how photography is a male-dominated place, so people can assume she’s an assistant on shoots which is frustrating but she told us you have to stay professional as you’re representing your brand and a magazine. This is important as it can be hard to deal with rude people but this is something I will learn over time. She also told us to build connections now and keep good relationships with people: picture editors, agents, galleries etc. This is also something that I am currently in the process of doing, building a network in order to help me start my freelance career.
In the Q&A I asked Carlotta about submitting and pitching to magazines and how I would go about this as I am keen to learn how to approach people for work in a freelance career. This is the advice she gave me:
When pitching to brands, send a mood board or PDF of images, your pitch (what you want to do, why they should ask you to do it, what they will get), visual references, and links to previous work/ website.
Show that you’re capable and that you’ve done stuff.
Keep up to date with magazines- buy them regularly or have a subscription.
This advice from Carlotta was very helpful in guiding me in the direction of how to pitch to magazines and clients and I found the way she talks about her work and process very interesting and shows how covid has affected the creative industry in many different ways.
Carlotta’s website: https://carlottacardana.com/
Screenshot of Carlotta’s website