Hysteria

Formento Formento

TALENTS
Visage Models Hungary, Wam Models, Playground Casting and Noemi Kappel

MAKEUP ARTIST
Eszter Galambos

HAIR STYLIST
Paolo Ferreira

STYLING
Formento+Formento vintage and Sugar High Love Stoned

Hysteria

Interview with Formento & Formento

How did you find each other and what made you work as a photographer duo and why do you work as a couple? How do you split the work?

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. Bringin deliberate quality, orchestrating ambiance that lulls you into a cradle of the uncanny and perverse.

Where do you get your ideas from? Your productions are often completed in a rather short amount of time – and yet you work in many different locations, on many motifs at the same time, stage group scenes, organizie props such like old cars. How do you manage all this?

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 it fucking feels! Our ideas come from our past, from our childhood, from our nightmares and from our moments of joy. We bring our baggage to set and but also rely heavily on our subject’s baggage. That alchemy is what makes our photography a success. We normally spend 2-3 years on a series and pretty much do everything ourselves. We like this control from beginning to end.

Your work does primarily not seem to be editorial or commercial. So in what way do you showcase it and what is the concept behind? How many galleries are showing your work and how many exhibitions are per year?

We are fortunate enough to be happy at a "level of fuck you", a line from Rupert Wyatt's movie The Gambler.. Basically, you own your house you are debt free and you can chose to do or not do anything you want. Not to say we don't shoot commercial/editorial work, but the secret is to not have to whore your art out to what you don't think is worthy just to pay the rent. We do enjoy the full production of doing a big ad job or music video but at least we have the option now to pick and choose whom we want to work with. As for the galleries at the moment we have a dozen or so worldwide, but we are in the process of getting that down to about 3 galleries we love and have the same level of passion for the art of photography. David and Nicholas of Fahey Klein Gallery (LA) Abby of Taylor and Graham Gallery (NY) and Hans of ARTITLED contemporary (UK/Netherlands)

‘Hysteria’ is an opulent project, that encompasses different episodes of US history of the 20th century. What’s it about?

Images dealing with beauty and upheaval, brutality and optimism. Post WW2, a time when it seemed as if America was at the height of its power and also on the verge of spinning out of control. Issue in a world we still know and contend with today.

What is your favorite episode?

Love the atomic 50's the big boom, the clean mid-century architecture, the big cars, the big hair and the dapper styling.

How much time did you spent on the project? And how many sets, locations had been involved into this?

We shot from 2015-2017 countless sets and studio set up. We tried to shoot at least every 2 weeks. Bigger productions would of course involve more set up and pre-visualizations.

Why did you choose Budapest as one of the locations to tell an American, post-war story?

It just so happened that Korda Studio in Budapest had a NYC backlot from the film Watchmen. It was perfect for what we needed, vintage New York with full control of 5 city blocks!

Your work radiates a certain cinematographic flair, with an often dramatic lighting mood. How would you describe your style, and where do you see yourselves positioned in thin respect?

Within our approach lies a shifting crux, our love for a commercially appealing beautiful lit, impeccably styled, flawlessly made up women in our image and our abrasion of that same culture. There is something that can be comforting with just looking at something in detail, to just be lost in observing, the pleasure of looking, the surface, the structure, the motion of the light. We think this is linked to reflecting around what the photograph can mean and the more symbolic potential of the medium.

What other projects do you have in mind? Can you already give away any details?

I love our latest project, working title is "Insert a Swear Word in a Love Poem". We have traveled so much in the past 10 years and now we have a 1-acre piece of heaven in Connecticut and we are personally building 3 studios to house all the props we have accumulated of the years and the pleasure of building sets and working from home. The work will explore opposite forces in union. Prim but beneath the surface something suggestively dirty. To complicate our reading of a picture, to ask not simply to look at a photograph but to look inside and see what else is there. A photograph that is so aesthetically ravishing you may find yourself enjoying them a little too much.