It’s not every day that you come across an absolutely stunning and somewhat disturbing series of photos entitled “Golden Pig and Bitches”. But you never know what you’re going to get from Romanian art collective Carioca Studio, a group of professionals that produce astoundingly creative and well-crafted ads, campaigns and projects.
Carioca’s work may range from fun and goofy to dark and bizarre, but it’s always fresh, unexpected and unflinching, which is exactly what makes their ads so effective – it’s hard to turn away from the issue of child slavery when photos of children chained up like animals are staring you in the face.
Every single image in Carioca’s portfolio, from energetic and colorful campaigns for companies like Pepsi and Twix to their looser, more artistic personal projects, is incredibly visually striking. It’s hard to say whether every detail is carefully thought out or some kind of magic simply occurs in the studio, but all of these images are the result of a concerted group effort.
“Carioca is a photo production house,” an anonymous member of Carioca told WebUrbanist in 2009. “We have production, photo, postproduction, and CGI departments. We have here 3 in-house photographers (which are also the partners in Carioca, together with a production guy). We use to sign the works as Carioca (because indeed every visual is a collective work) and we like it to be that way.”
