Thomas Woland

Born in Rome in 1975, Filippo Caroti, also known as Thomas Woland, is one of the most intriguing fashion photographers around at the moment. Despite his Italian roots, his home is now London where he has established his own studio.
His alias exudes love for art in every form: Woland is the name of the well-known character of Bulgakov’s novel – The master and Margarita-, and the name Thomas is an homage to the leading actor in Antonioni’s movie – Blow Up.

It cab be said that Woland was basically brought into this world to be a photographer. As a child, photography was just a “a game to record and preserve memories” of his travels. In 2004 he became a professional, working mainly as a portraitist for luxury men’s magazine Monsieur. Thus, in 2006 he decided to naturally switch to fashion photography, and he has since then created an enormous amount of incredible fashion editorials and campaigns for international magazines and brands. Behind this choice lies the desire to tell a story – an unpredictable story where “boundaries between reality and tales are uncertain”.
His style is liquid and his inspiration comes from the never ending capability of a superb artist – Pablo Picasso – to mix different styles without losing the core concept of his art.

As an artist, don’t ask him to choose between Black&White and colors, as the response will be quite vague. And it’s a completely legitimate doubt – colors work for certain subjects and moods, while B&W for others. Woland, though, shoots mostly subjects and moods that are more suitable with B&W, he says “it’s like a father’s favorite son: the other son is likely to be just more challenging to manage, hence possibly more interesting”.

Curiosity, echoes of nostalgia and emotions: these are Woland keywords in response to evolution of his approach to photography and new professional challenges. Evolution is an hard process that requires great perseverance and patience, but that leads you to do and experience new and unexpected things.

Reminiscing the days he he started snapping his camera as a child, photography is now just a bigger and more serious game. Shooting stories for magazines is for him like being a kid at the playground with no mommy surveillance. But the game sometimes becomes complicated, like his latest exhibition temporarily named “The Black Queens”. This is a 3-year project that is most about feelings and mood, so it’s a project in flux, that keeps re-defining itself every day.

Why strictly define photography? A picture is neither one shot nor multi-shot, it’s not production plus post-production. Woland doesn’t seem to have a particular interest in technical aspects of photography, that is quite over-rated and used as an alibi indeed. “There’s basically no difference between Photoshop and Canova's marble smoothing tools” – Woland (ipset) dixit.