Formento + Formento are known for their inventive and stylized photography that explore the uncanny and perverse, revealing double edged allegories with underlying lyricism . Utilising conceptually playful staged scenes that are psychologically evocative, the erie sensuality of their style reveals a fascination with fiction and reality. Under the name Formento + Formento, Richeille Formento styles and art directs, while BJ Formento lights and photographs.
Formento + Formento are known for their inventive and stylized photography that explore the uncanny and perverse, revealing double edged allegories with underlying lyricism . Utilising conceptually playful staged scenes that are psychologically evocative, the erie sensuality of their style reveals a fascination with fiction and reality. Under the name Formento + Formento, Richeille Formento styles and art directs, while BJ Formento lights and photographs. The images are a mutual portrait - an exchange in which the artist’s individualities blur, leaving traces on each other. Together the duo has an enthralling ability to absorb the spirit of a time and place, creating cinematic photographs, with a vision that references the past but remains contemporary and highly original. To date, they have produced eight bodies of work, and are currently working on their new series "36".
In winter of 2018 they returned to Japan, focused on channeling the artist Hokusai and asked the question of what Mt. Fuji means to them. "We consider Japan our spirit haven and are always yearning to come back and go deeper in our exploration of the people and the landscape. This new work moved us out of the city of Tokyo and into the countryside. Here we wanted to live under the ever changing appearance of Mt. Fuji and experience its burning energy, creating an ambiguous narrative with our women as they played out an imagined life under the strength of the mountain and beyond the edge of the frame.
Circumstance (2008-2010): Embarking on a 1 year road trip from New York to Los Angeles and back, the Formento's travelled through twenty-five states, photographing women they met along the way. Referencing classic American paintings and cinema, Circumstance embodies the combined American vision of both BJ and Richeille. Capturing a country during uncertain times, their dramatically lit subjects are transformed into heroines and femme fatales caught in intense moments of emotion and reflection.
Japan Diaries (2013-present): The highly staged and melodramatic images conjure many references: 1950s Japanese cinema, the photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki, Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and the erotic imagery of Ero Guro paintings. As outside observers, the Formentos’ stylized images explore the dichotomies that embody modern Japan -blurring the aesthetics between tradition and the ultra modern, fantasy and reality. The captivating tableaus exude a sense of tension,melancholy, and a quiet unease. Each image from Japan Diaries exists as if it were a still taken from a noir Japanese film, each solitary figure yearning for something unknown.
She Is Cuba (2014): In Cuba's forbidden allure, amongst the crumbling walls of colonial architecture, the abandoned cinemas and casinos, the street of old Havana and all the glory that once was, Formento + Formento have created photographs where the radiant, bombastic Cuban woman plays the heroine. They have captured the twilight of the Castro era, the imminent change, the struggle, the anxiety and the hope.
