Surrealist Waste: The World of Decay and Living by Jodie Cartman

Lomographer Jodie Cartman, a.k.a. floorshow, spices up the Community with some of the most intricate and daring photographs to have ever graced the Lomography gallery as she introduces the series Surrealist Waste.

Jodie has always been the experimentalist, and it's exactly how she got introduced to the photographic medium while she was playing around digital photography and Photoshop. She'd play with effects filters, props, image settings to make photographs stand out more than they originally have. After playing with pixels, she bought herself a 35 mm film camera. a Canon AE-1. off of eBay. The LomoChrome Purple film was the first roll that she loaded on her camera as she strolled out of the woods on one summer evening.

From there on, she never looked back. That first yet most memorable encounter with the LomoChrome Purple film made her even more curious with analogue techniques. Jodie studied the various effects with the film aesthetic through the use of expired, slide, cross-processing, film soup, and more. This led her to find one of her favorite formulas, the Adox Color Implosion. The emulsion is what made her series Surrealist Waste the stunning and avant-garde body of work.

The idea is to create an over-the-top, hyper-surealist dimension. Surrealist Waste is its own world where opposites meet in between: the organic and the aritficial,, life and death. Having a career as a milliner and as a photographer, Jodie used some of her vintage flowers to make the decorations and ornamental design in the series. As such, she's always influenced by colors, textures, the whimsical and peculiar – developing an instinct to seek on such qualities in her artwork.

“A juxtaposed world of oddities and curiosities. Where vintage meets Contemporary, Old meets new, decay – dead flowers, mouldy fruit, fish heads and bones – meets the living, and perpetual objects – antique ornaments, neon plastic flowers, vintage costume – and all co-exist in a queer land of Surrealist Waste.”

Jodie has a penchant for making out-of-this-world concepts as she values the visual storytelling aspect of photography the most. Her compositions are influenced by old tales and lores that have people have grown familiar with, adds the element of fantasy through costumes and characters – all of this in contrast to the colorful-modern aesthetic. Being mindful and creating depth of field was essential Surrealist Waste. What goes on with the foreground and background should remain harmonious, and noted that it was the tricky part of the shoot. She also created 3D images out of the series.

Her background in the theatrical arts helps her execute emotion-memory techniques to get her subjects be 'in character'. She speaks more about her technique:

“I create stories and characters for each of my shoots which come from my love of make-believe - scary stories, folklore, witches and fairy tales. I love to dress up and include this in my shoots through costume and characters... I love looking at the characters in old photographs and wonder about the people that created them - the techniques and colours of bygone days inspire me to create something that people in future generations will enjoy and revel in after I’m long gone.”

She continues on to create modern wonderlands through film.

For more of Jodie's out of this world photographs, visit her portfolio and LomoHome.

written by cielsan on 2019-05-25 #people #portraiture #floorshow #jodie-cartman