For the first in their series of Photographer Talks, the Iconic Images Gallery will host Formento + Formento for an evening of art, books, conversation and questions.
BJ Formento, fashion and street photographer, and Richeille Formento, a fashion designer and art director, are a husband and wife duo collaborating on projects that explore the cultural and aesthetic implications of place through staged environments and saturated colours.
BJ Formento introduces their work as follow:
Richeille and I are taking a few years to explore sentimental longing, feelings of pleasure, the wistful affection we have for the past and for a period or place. Nostalgia waxes as the traditional understanding of time wanes. We salvage artifacts of the past for entertainment, to calm present anxieties. We discuss the present in terms of the past, and we judge the present by the standards of long ago. Discussions of movies and television and music tend to begin with the question, “Remember when?” Those words summon happy thoughts. Or perhaps we return to the past because we are expert in it. Human beings are temporal creatures, we need ways to understand and to order the past, the present, and the future. Nostalgia, most truly and most meaningfully, is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of meeting the people you missed knowing.
Are we Nostalgic because we are unhappy with the present or are frustrated because we are so nostalgic? Through art we hope to unearth these fleeting feelings that overcome us, and to create work that connects us.
BJ Formento
Join them at 4pm on Saturday September 9th at The Iconic Images Gallery, 16 Waterloo Place, SW1Y 4AR.
