These Festival Pictures With A Whimsical Twist Are All The Life You Need Today

(All picture credits: Sarah Anne Johnson)

So. Much. Beauty.

Music festivals are ethereal experiences. They manage to exhilarate and excite us. Sometimes all at once. It’s quite difficult to put in words. So it is no wonder we are in love with photographer Sarah Anne Johnson’s impeccable photo series that explores the festival consciousness. Titled ‘Field Trip’, the photo series captures the experience of a music festival through her eyes. The result elevates these pictures from simple photographs to high art.

She has a very quirky way of putting forward her vision. Her weapons of mass creation are paint, scissors, glitter and Photoshop, She uses these to convert the images, or ‘psychological landscapes’ as she like to refer to them as representations of her whimsical thoughts. The results are surprisingly relatable. A kind of whimsical reality.

Here is what she has to say about the series:

‘With the work I made for Field Trip, I wanted to create visionary realms that echo the fringe aesthetics of festival culture, simulating a scope of perceived psychological states. I see these festivals as a place for a community of people to come together and attempt to create a modern day Dionysian celebration through their connection to nature, music and dance, and the rejection of social norms.’

After taking the pictures, Johnson infuses them with a colourful dose of feels. Sarah refuses to believe that moments can be captured in just one frame. A picture is a frozen moment of thoughts, feelings and stories and unless it emotes that, it cannot really be considered a success. So she splashes colours, smears ink and permeates glitter bombs in her pictures. And we think it does quite a fine job of expressing the hued excitement that is a music festival.

So here, we present ‘Field Trip‘, the series of pictures that Johnson took when she visited Shambhala in British Columbia, Canada.

Like this one, which is titled ‘Cavemen‘.

Faces and bodies coloured in, the people in the picture become one tribe. No one’s left out.

It’s the peek into her imagination that makes this photo series for such interesting viewing. No two people look at things the same and her glitter and paint splattered images capture the feel of music festivals.

Where we see crowds, she sees a heady fusion of colourful energies.

Two-faced

She has a way with faces, as well. Something as simple as a close up portrait gets a glitzy, other-worldly feel. These effects do well to express the psychedelic and dreamy coalescence of meeting new people at festivals.

She perfectly captures the feelings of wanderlust, loneliness or freedom that take over us when we afford ourselves the luxury of disassociating from reality. She does this working the colour on seemingly random images.