Biografia
“the world is full of fictional characters
looking for their stories.”
-Diane Arbus
In the wake of the recent economic slump, after working for commercial clients for more than a decade, husband and wife team, BJ and Richeille Formento's lives took an exciting new turn with their most personal collection of work to date. ‘Circumstance’ is their tragic yet romantic, cinematic portrayal of a depressed time.
Their objective was to create a scenario with haunting tension and sense of distress while exploring the potentially voyeuristic nature of photography.
In November 2009, Formento+Formento packed their home and 3 Siamese cats into their 27ft silver Airstream and began their epic cross country adventure. Armed with a small budget for everything from gas to styling, the plan was 5 months, 25 states and 50 women. With just the two of them to produce, style and shoot the entire production, they used googlemap as their travel guide and they embraced the open road, often scouting locations, meeting women and shooting them on the same day.
Paying homage to the work of Hitchcock, with influences of Cindy Sherman, as well as Edward Hopper - a prominent American realist painter who made solitude and introspection an important theme in his painting – ‘Circumstance’ is a body of work that encompasses these tributes and presents women at their most vulnerable, yet strong, to display a soul-searching calmness in the face of disaster. And although the locations and the heroine are specific, the concerns they are dealing with are universal.
