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Wes Anderson-Esque Posters Map Cult Films' Props and Blueprints

UK artist Jordan Bolton photographs exquisitely modeled movie artifacts to craft modern film posters.
Toutes les images sont publiées avec l’aimable autorisation de Jordan Bolton​.

The tried and true mantra of “show don’t tell” encourages filmmakers to form narratives which rely less on explicit exposition and more on minute details. In his pursuit of recreating cult movie posters, photographic artist Jordan Bolton focuses on the belongings and settings of a handful of iconic films.

Simply titled Objects,Bolton's series was inspired by the Museum of Broken Relationships, which exhibited a similar layout of curios and knick-knacks. In the case of Objects, orderly grids line prop pieces up into what look like exploded 3D photo albums. Often composed of simple products like paper, paint, and foam, just one of Jordan Bolton’s posters can include over 100 objects.

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The British artist gives special care to the signature aesthetic of each film, mirroring colors and wardrobe stylings with his backgrounds and arrangements. Some of the more expansive photo designs, such as those depicting Her and Pulp Fiction, recreate every corridor and doorway of their films' sets.

In an interview, Bolton told The Creators Project that he was inspired by the film essays of Susan Sontag, describing them as having an an “intense amount of attention to the smallest details.” “Once I started reading those,” Bolton said, “I started seeing films in a different way, not only as characters and stories, but as worlds of minutiae.”

"I try and think of creative ways to create objects, an example being in the film Carol," Bolton told us. "There are many pieces of jewelry which are unique to the film, [and] I have no chance of getting a hold of, so my solution was to get white tack and mould it into the shape of the jewelry. Then I would spray it gold or silver and add any details with paint, so in the poster it ends up looking like high-end unique 50s jewelry but in fact probably cost around 50 pounds (around $61.00) to make.”

"Once I’ve gone through [the film], I make a list of every object. In my studio I’ve got boxes upon boxes of junk from old posters that I’ve kept, and I’ll start going through them and i’ll go to pound shops and charity shops to try find any cheap objects I can cut up, paint, and alter to make them look like a certain object in the film. I usually end up making upwards of 100 objects for each poster," Bolton explains. Check out more of the fruits of his labors below:

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To see more from Jordan Bolton’s Objects series, visit his Tumblr, and find prints of his work on his Etsy page here.

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