Best Advertising Photography By Carl Warner

Carl Warner was born in Liverpool, England in 1963. At the age of seven he moved to Kent with his parents and as an only child spent hours in his bedroom listening to music, drawing and creating worlds from his imagination, inspired by the posters on his walls by artists such as Salvador Dali and Patrick Woodroofe and the record sleeve designs of Roger Dean and the work of Hipgnosis.

Carl began his career by going to Maidstone College of Art with a view to becoming an illustrator as he had a good talent for drawing, but he quickly discovered that his ideas and creative eye was better suited to photography as he saw it as a faster and more exciting medium in which to work. After a year’s foundation course at the college he moved to the London College of Printing in 1982 to do a three year degree course in photography, film and television.
In 1985 he left to become assistant to David Lowe, a photographer based in Knightsbridge, London, where he first met art directors, model makers and retouchers who created images for the advertising industry. After a year of assisting he set up a studio next to David and began working for ad agencies, design groups and PR houses. Although a very keen landscape photographer he initially established himself as a still life photographer, and then began to branch out into other areas of photography in the advertising world, shooting people and landscapes for a wide variety of products and brands.
Having become a successful advertising photographer from the mid to late 80′s through to the mid nineties he found that his work was becoming less in demand as well as unfulfilling creatively. He was searching for a something new and different to do with his talent that would not only rekindle his interest in photography but inject some life into his flagging business. Inspiration seemed hard to find, but one day while walking around a food market he found some wonderful portabello mushrooms which he thought looked like some kind of tree from an alien world. So he took them back to his studio with a few other ingredients such as rice seeds and beans with a view to try and create a miniature scene on a table top.

The Mushroom Savanna became his first “Foodscape” and over the next ten years he continued to develop a body of work making landscapes out of food, and this began to attract the advertising industry once again who began commissioning him for advertising campaigns for various food based products and brands.