I create images to feel like the aftertaste of a dream: I have always looked at the world the way you look at someone you can’t stop loving. With hunger, tenderness, and the ache of knowing nothing stays still.
Christian Carrillo, MFA is an image-maker, art director, photographer, and creative director living between San Diego and New York City.
He grew up among rows of vines, where the seasons revealed themselves slowly in the curl of a tendril, the blush of ripening fruit, the patient alchemy of time. That landscape taught him to find beauty in imperfection and meaning in the unhurried. Stories, like wine, deepen with time and are shaped as much by their flaws as by their perfection.
His eye was formed early. A manual Nikon FM film camera, gifted by a family friend, became his first language… one he still speaks today. Raised on vinyl records, salty ocean air, and the quiet devotion of film photography, Christian developed a sensibility rooted in mood, nostalgia, and romantic tension.
He favors grain over gloss. The accidental over the arranged. The moment just before and just after.
His practice has grown around a single conviction: that commercial work and artistic work aren’t opposing forces. Over the years Christian has brought that belief to projects across fashion, beauty, hospitality, food & beverage, and lifestyle by moving fluidly between creative direction ,art direction, and photography, still image, and motion, with the same eye and same instinct regardless of the brief.
Artist Statement
I grew up among rows of vines, learning to read the world through texture, patience, and slow revelation. That rhythm never left me. It lives in the grain of my film, in the light leaks I keep, in the quiet mistakes that make an image feel alive.
I am drawn to what is slightly undone: motion that softens edge, breath that deepens a moment. I chase unrepeatable moments: wind in hair, fabric mid-sway, laughter that spills beyond the frame, the unguarded glance, the weight of proximity. I photograph people the way you look at someone you love when they don’t know you’re looking. With that quality of attention: unhurried, hungry, reverent. My work has always been drawn to the male form not as monument but as feeling: tender, complicated, alive to its own beauty without needing to perform it.
Everything I make is in some way about love and intimacy. Its presence, its ache, its impossibility. Desire moves through my work not always as subject, but as atmosphere and the tension between what is and what is almost.
I make images to hold what can’t stay still. To keep what is alive. To make an image is to confess something. Every frame I’ve ever taken is, in some way, a love letter.
My name is Christian Carrillo. The best photographs feel like they were always there waiting in the archive, carrying nostalgia for a moment you may never have lived, but somehow already remember.
Selected Clients & Features
Some brands that trust me and publications that have featured my work
Kodak
Steve Madden
Waldorf Astoria
GAP
Flamingo Estate
Malin+Goetz
Kimpton Hotels
Willy Chavarria
Typology Paris
Acura
Jack Henry
Topicals
Jones Road
Mansur Gavriel
Sony Music
Elwood
Corridor NYC
ERL