Like Reese’s peanut butter cups, Jenny Gage & Tom Betterton are the two great tastes that taste great together. Enlisting this photography team’s services throughout the years for Base clients such as Loewe and Kiki de Montparnasse, we’ve had the chance to witness their unique working process. Tom & Jenny took a few moments to answer some questions from Base partner Geoff Cook, revealing that their thoughts on photography are as rich and refreshing as their work itself.
Base: What’s the back story? Were you shooting independently and then you met? Or did you meet at the start of your careers?
Tom Betterton/Jenny Gage: We met just after college. Jenny was studying photography and about to go to Yale for her graduate degree. Tom was painting and making films. We immediately realized that we liked working together more than working separately.
B: Who/what influenced you to become photographers?
TB/JG: It was the process of being together and endlessly discussing and exploring ideas about art and photography. Jenny’s deep knowledge of photography and Tom’s ideas about cinema and composition just seemed to reinforce each other as soon as we began to make pictures together. We were immediately interested in the idea of using photography to suggest narratives. To construct scenarios that would be read as plausibly real and also be recognized as a constructed image.
B: What’s your first memory about photography?
JG: Taking pictures of friends after grade school. dressing them up, doing their hair and make up, playing make-believe. i wish i still had those pictures!
B: What were your defining moments early on? Key shoots? Lucky breaks?
TB/JG: One moment that put us on the road to where we are now was that, while we were having a show at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in new york, we were asked to shoot a fashion story for W magazine. It was at a moment when the fashion world was really looking to incorporate the vision of ‘fine artists’ into fashion photography. Ironically, we had been looking at fashion photography, particularly the more cinematic narrative work of the 90′s and thinking that it some of it was as interesting as what was showing in galleries. So of course we jumped at the chance.
B: How do you feel about the early greats? Irving Penn? Avedon?
TB/JG: love. can we add Frank, Friedlander, Eggleston, Lange, Evans, Bresson, Winogrand, Outerbridge, Weston, Robert Adams, Riis etc?
B: I have heard your work described as “progressive but approachable”. It’s true that people relate well to your lighting and compositions. Is this an accurate assessment of your work?
TB/JG: we always try to put two very different elements into our images. on the one hand we try to make them beautiful, easy and seductive in the belief that this is what draws the viewer into the work. then we also try to create something in the images that is somewhat off, or difficult to resolve or to understand. this is the element that we love and we look for in all the great photography of our inspirations and heroes. and this is what makes the image resonate and become something that you keep thinking about and going back to.
B: What do you like about shooting fashion photography?
TB/JG: its very cool and rewarding to go through intense collaboration necessary to make all the elements come together and at the end look seamless and effortless.
B: What does the future of fashion photography look like?
TB/JG: thats hard to say. it seems like we are seeing the traditional magazine format going away. it would be great it we could say that this would give way to an interesting new editorial frontier of creativity and risk taking. but it looks more likely that fashion photography images will more and more be created as direct sales tools and less as inspirational gestures.
B: The weight of models is an increasingly hot topic in the fashion world. What’s your stance on this?
TB/JG: we are humanists and romantics so we have always shot ‘real’ women. we see it as a positive sign that people in the industry are looking for something to replace the current rail-thin standard.
To read part II of this interview, click here.
For more information about Tom and Jenny click here.
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