The duo of photographers Formento and Formento do us the honor of answering our questions. Meeting with a reference in contemporary photography ! They present to us exclusively some of the visuals of their last shoots.
RC. What is your background?
To fall in love with photography is one thing. To fall in love while creating photographs is a whole other thing, and both happened to us. I believe beauty is what happens when people who care about each other make thing together.
Richeille is an art director who came to Miami in 2015 and hired me to come out from NYC to shoot a few assignments for her company. We clicked immediately both on and off set . I like to say "Richeille is in the details and BJ is in the atmosphere" So although we started together working in the commercial world, we are able to bring that kind of attention to detail, the glamour of hair and make-up, the timelessness of the styling with a feline like precision to every dissimilitude. Bringing deliberate quality, orchestrating ambiance that lulls you into a cradle of the uncanny and perverse.
RC. How did photography become your profession ?
It is because I am not good at anything else! I cant paint,I cant draw and my singing career is not taking off. Kidding aside, My father was a amateur photographer and took many selfies of his 15 years in the US Navy and really beautiful vernacular portraits of my mom. So growing up there was a minolta camera, cherished photo albums and thousands of kodachrome slides. I remember making a projector out of a shoebox and a flashlight, I have 5 siblings and so we had a massive dining table. I would throw a blanket over said table and hold a slideshow of dad's work. So early on I realized the emotional value of photography, the way it connects people, the unspoken universal language and most importantly how 1 photograph has the power to transport you into a whole different world. I adore the strength of this medium to inspire imagination.
RC. How do your creative ideas come from?
We have gotten frustrated with the regular documentary read of photography and really bored with the so called staged photography of the late. Just seems so cookie cutter clear, and lacking any mystery. Don't show me what a kiss looks like, show me how fucking it feels!
Our ideas come from our past, from our childhood, from our nightmares and from our moments of joy. How we see is shaped by our previous lives, books we've read, films we've seen, bringing the reality of our lives to the fiction of our photographs. We believe that collaboration between us and the models is very important. We always discuss the subject of our themes with our models prior to shooting, they can bring their best interpretation to our photographs and we engage naturally that way the process is organic.
RC. What are your inspirations ?
My first photography book didn’t have much photographs in it. Edward Weston’s daybooks where this towering photographer of the 20th century journal. For more than fifteen years, Edward Weston kept a diary in which he recorded his struggle to understand himself, his society, and his medium. Seldom has an artist written about his life as vividly, intimately, or sensitively. And for reasons that I couldn’t articulate then I was drawn to how his nudes looked like peppers and his peppers looked and felt like his shells. So this idea that pictures can be so different but still have this thread that is held together by an artists vision for me was mind blowing.
Another big part of my world is the works of Duane Michals.Contemplative, confessional, and comedic, the art of Duane Michals exerts an appeal that transcends the conventional audience of photography. Since the early 1960s, Michals has worked past what he sees as the limitations of the camera: he writes in the margins of his prints, creates sequences of images that explore intangible human dilemmas (doubt, mortality, desire), and derives poetic effects from technical errors such as double exposure and motion blur. Richeille and I are so lucky to have become friends with Duane we have shared many evenings in his Manhattan home and he always instills the notion that it is the artist’s duty to always evolve and explore.
RC. What is your favorite project?
It has to be Japan Diaries! We have been over 5 times since 2013. It is such a sexually charged place but at the same time they are so strict with nudity. We have gotten in trouble too many times to mention.
RC. What material do you like?
”The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.” Ansel Adams. The only real lens you need for exceptional photography is your own eyes. This quote makes me smile, because I feel like Adams is poking gentle fun of those of us who are obsessed with photography gear.
RC. Do you have a technical tip to share?
Jerry Saltz said "Make an enemy of envy !!!" Envy is in the service of others, cut it out now or it will eat you alive and it will make you bitter, angry, mean, scared, il will make you a person that cannot be generous, loving and it will lead to cynicism and destroy your art. As for a technical tip, learn your tools like no other and then forget it exists.
Formento & Formento - Backstages for Normal Magazine
RC. Do you have any projects to come? expos / Shootings?
We’ve been struggling in this new world, we have been told we might not die but we will know someone who has. We wake up everyday finding it necessary to create for creativity is a survival strategy; it’s in every bone in our bodies, and always has been. What are our other options? to be overwhelmed by the sadness of doing nothing? Darwin said that survival depended on those “most adaptive to change.”
Richeille and I normally spend winter traveling Japan and other Asian countries we had our 1st quarter of 2020 all planned out, but after hearing the news from China back in December we decided to cancel our plans and started to build a miniature city here at home. A very intimate artistic practice that is more internal. Creating a stage out of nothing rather than searching out locations abroad.
This series explores the #metoo movement worldwide. This hunger city represents the evils of society. Our women seem like the sleeping giants that have been finally woke. We hope you find this note useful, inspiring and informative, or that it simply cheers you up while self-isolating, social-distancing, working from home or working to keep essential services going, Art will go on. It always has. All we know is that everything is different; we don’t know how, only that it is. The unimaginable is now reality. Viruses come and go but Art will Last forever!
