PATTY CARROLL

-You create these incredible, full-scale sets for each photo. What is your process like from your first idea to the final image?

The ideas come from a variety of sources. Sometimes I have an actual idea about home that becomes a picture, but usually it starts with a prop or a title. For instance, I found some green fabric that had stylized marijuana plants on it. Since dispensaries are everywhere now, it seemed like a good time to bring it in a picture. In response, we made a kitchen picture called, “Pot and Pans” in shades of green. I made brownies and the woman is holding a cheroot. Another example; a friend of mine gave me a brown vintage donut phone. I usually do not use brown as a color palette, but it lead to us doing a picture called “Glassy Eyed.” My assistant always wanted to do a picture with amber glass in it, so this became a retro 1970’s picture in browns. We also did an entire room installation with it in a gallery. Early on, I made a picture based on the Victorian short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” where the woman goes mad as she is confined to a room with it. It was a natural idea for the series! "The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."  - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

After the initial idea or color is determined, then it is a process of gathering everything to go in the picture-furniture, objects, lamps etc. that we find or build. Things move around, the figure is put into the set, the whole thing changes about 50 times. I start taking pictures of it to establish the square crop and then we move things around, take things out, add more things, change something and take a picture each time. We look at it on the computer screen that is large to see details, and then repeat the process until everything seems right. It often takes several days of this before it is done. I only fix color and small annoying things in photoshop. We do not add anything digitally, it is all done in the set.