“Formento & Formento wear rose-colored glasses but they are not without a critical eye,” says Robert Klein, owner of Robert Klein Gallery.
A commercial photographer and a stylist, BJ & Richeille Formento met on assignment in 2005 and were married three months later. American Beauty on Bruised Knees is an intensive project the couple started in November 2009, in the midst of the economic recession, as a means of understanding the changing face of the American Dream. Working from an Airstream trailer, Formento & Formento traveled to more than 25 states to photograph women they met online and along the way. What began as a visual story of love lost developed into a cinematic chronicle of hope, fear, passion, beauty, and defeat.
“[B]ack roads led us to ghost towns and forgotten strip malls, to abandoned churches and motels, to rotting steel mills and theatres, prisons, airports, and train stations,” says BJ. “We found women in these towns to play our heroines.” Formento & Formento have named Edward Hopper, Alfred Hitchcock, Cindy Sherman, and David Lynch as influences. Dramatically lit and styled, their work belongs to the twenty-first century but is grounded in the twentieth.
EXHIBITION
American Beauty on Bruised Knees
Formento & Formento
From May 2nd to 21st June, 2014
Robert Klein Gallery @ Ars Libri
500 Harrison Avenue Boston, MA 02119
United States
