ANDRÉ CARRARA: MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST

André Carrara is a world-established fashion photographer based in France. After being introduced to photography as a young teen by his sister, Carrara began taking photographs in Paris and experimenting with the medium. When he was just 20 years-old, he was hired as an assistant by the advertising agency, SNIP. By 1963, he was able to create his own advertising campaign for Lacoste. Shortly, after, the then artistic director of French Vogue, gave him the opportunity to work more creatively and independently. Throughout his career, Cararra’s work has been published in Vogue Italia, COSMOPOLITAN, ELLE, Marie-Claire, GLMOUR, GRAZIA and many more.

In the 1990s, by the request of Anna Wintour, André Carrara worked regularly for the American magazine Allure and other various other publications. Yet, his most beautiful subjects and photographs were captured between 1980-200 while he worked for MarieClaire and Marie-Claire Bis in collaboration with the art directors Walter Rospert and Fred Rawiler.

OUR NOTES ABOUT ANDRE CARRARA

Andre Carrara is one of those uniquely talented photographers whose work gets more sophisticated and profound the more we dive into it.

The French photographer is a very discreet, slightly anxious yet charming personality with an incredible culture and impeccable taste. Through the many interviews and conversations we had in Paris, I always left deeply inspired.

Throughout his extensive career, Andre Carrara has worked with the biggest names of the editorial world: Antoine Kieffer, who was then Vogue France’s art director; Hélène Lazareff, founder of Elle Magazine; Anna Wintour at Allure or Walter Rospert and Fred Rawiler, who were art directors of Marie Claire and Marie Claire Bis.

His style is meticulous and precise. Composition and lighting have always taken a very central role in his elegant and stylish photographs. He shot on film and, as a cinematographer creates a storyboard before shooting a scene, he similarly worked with polaroids he then kept in little notebooks with short comments written on them. He still owns them as little treasures along with the magazines where his images have been published. Listening to Andre is listening to a storyteller, a movie fan, and a geographer.

Carrara’s work is very cinematographic, and to understand it, we need to pay attention to the message carried by the location choice. Carrara creates stories inspired by the significance, heritage, and history of a specific place and transforms them into photographs. As he shared in one of our interviews together, “My images are not fashion images. They are closer to a short film, to a freeze-frame shot.”

His series called Stromboli is like a freeze-frame of the namesake film. With this image of a young woman climbing the slope because of the volcano’s eruption, Carrara encourages the viewer to enter the story of this woman who lives on the island.

In his portrait of Natalia Vodianova shot in 1999 in the Madeira Islands of Portugal, the model seems to embody previous generations of Portuguese women, their strength, their elegance, and distance. When looking at this powerful portrait, I travel to what I imagine being the 50’s in South Europe, like in a movie, but with the broader opportunity to imagine, I would get from reading a book.

That is the magic of Andre’s work.