Carl Warner is a London-based photographer who makes foodscapes: landscapes made of food. Carl says: “Although I’m very hands-on, I do use model makers and food stylists to help me create the sets. I tend to start with a drawing which I sketch out in order to get the composition worked out” The scenes are photographed in layers from foreground to background, as the process is very time-consuming and the food quickly wilts under the lights.
The images can take up to two or three days to build and photograph and then a couple of days retouching and fine-tuning them to blend together all the elements, Carl spends a lot of time planning each image before shooting in order to choose the best ingredients to replicate larger scale shapes and forms within nature. He spends a lot of time staring at vegetables in supermarkets, which can make him seem a little odd. However, finding the right shaped broccoli to use for a tree is an all-important task.
Carl says: “Although there is a fair amount of waste, there is a lot of food left over which is always shared out with the team, though most of the food used in the sets have either been super glued or pinned, and neither of these makes for good eating.”
Carl shoots the scenes using a Hasselblad H3D39 and retouches them on a Mac in his London studio. Carl hopes to produce a book in the future, reasoning that it would appeal to lovers of both food and art. You can purchase posters of his work here
