For the February edition of Format Picks, our monthly contest series, we asked artists to submit work inspired by the color red. The winner of this month’s $500 prize is photographer Carson Gilliland, who submitted an enigmatic series of five images that we can’t stop staring at.
Here’s what Gilliland had to say about his submission. “The images submitted inhabit a larger body of work which seeks to employ the characteristics of the urban flâneur to photograph the intimacy of a landscape inhabited. The color red plays a central role acting as both a public and private marker of a life lived and neglected.”
Carson Gilliland is a photographer currently based in Nebraska, where he is working towards an MFA in photography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His work has been previously featured in Archive Collective Magazine, Mossless, If You Leave, and a variety of other publications. Gilliland specializes in simple yet intriguing images defined by a fastidious attention to composition and color.
In this series, which is part on an ongoing work in progress, close ups linger on the details of fences and walls, rocks and grass, with destruction and repair emerging as contrasting themes. Dead wildlife is juxtaposed with new flowers; a cracking fencepost contrasts a duct-taped car window. In his submitted images, the color red emerges in different forms (a shirt, a fence, a bloody sheet) as a unifying theme for five disparate images.
Check back soon for details on the next edition of Format Picks, and how you can submit your work. And find more of Gilliland’s photography at his website, built using Format.
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