Once upon a time, a young photographer named Brett Warren took the fairy tales of his past and made them a reality.
Thursday night in the McCarty Auditorium, Warren will share the story behind his fantasy influenced photography as well as his journey to becoming the photographer he is today.
Warren is a graduate of Middle Tennessee State University, where he majored in dark room photography and graphic design. He has worked as a graphic designer for Country Music Television, in addition to collaborating on projects with Jack White and Taylor Swift. Warren is currently working with numerous clients while also pouring himself into his personal projects.
But this star-studded artist was once small town boy from McMinnville, Tennessee, who set out to express his version of an escape from reality.
“I’ve always been a fan of theatre and escapism in movies and things like that,” Warren said. “So I’m always a fan of filming something, a life escape, so I try to do that in my pictures. I wanna create an atmosphere that people can escape into. Even if it’s just for a minute, they can think about this other place that maybe exists.”
After discovering photography as a portal into his escapism wonderland, Warren found work after college as a graphic designer for CMT. However, a certain beloved element seemed to be missing for the photographer.
“It did certainly send me in a different direction because it was all about marketing, and it wasn’t necessarily about beauty or the aesthetics,” Warren said. “It was about these methods that you were sort of proclaiming really loudly — and it may not be very pretty.”
That’s when Warren discovered it was beauty he wished to see thrive within the work he would create.
“It just kinda sent me down this rabbit hole of, ‘Well, I’m gonna make a world where what I do is what I think is beautiful and people can enjoy it or not,'” Warren said, “but it just encouraged me to explore more, be a little more thoughtful, with what I was putting out there.”
To accompany his extravagant photos is another fairy tale element. Warren often uses moral takeaways throughout his photographic stories in a way similar to his favorite childhood tales, similar to Aesop’s Fables. His work includes photo shoots with titles such as, “Midas Touch,” “Ugly Duckling” and “Robotic Girl,” which have story-telling undertones.
“I’ve kind of tried to make some sort of a moral come through, like ‘The Ugly Duckling’ is about transformation and worrying about yourself,” Warren said. “That was right after I got back from New York and it’s about, figuratively, pretty much the transition I went through. I was still the same person, but there was just this whole new side of me and I learned so much. Something was different.
“Every personal project has its own personal experiences and sort of morals woven throughout.”
Though his work is laden with elaborate props, make-up and many theatrical themes, one of Warren’s main objectives is to shoot a story or moment. In addition to this storytelling style of photography, Warren has high hopes for his future work.
“I really want to make something that is long-standing and something that someone can look at and sort of make their own story or try to figure more about this person,” Warren said. “As long as someone can try and make a story or learn something from it, that’s what I like.”
To hear more about Warren’s photographical “happily ever after,” check out his Art Talk presentation tonight in Room 109 of the Art and Architecture Building at 7:30 p.m.
