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Known internationally for their quirky, modern, minimalist and conceptual series of portraits, Ilka & Franz are a are a German/Austrian photographic duo based in London. They describe their work, that involves models, but also objects and animals, as extremely precise and meticulously directed in details.
Curious and fashinated by their stilistic choices, sometimes bizarre, we asked them some questions.
First of all, could you tell us something about you individually, your studies, how your interest in photography was born…
Ilka: Both of us have been round the block a bit with degrees and careers not related to photography. In fact, Franz used to be a gardener! I guess we both always had a strong interest in visual art but took our time in figuring out what exactly that could be and how to make it a career.
What about you as a duo, indeed? How did you meet and everything began?
Ilka: Franz moved from his Austrian village to London to assist photographers here. I had been in the city a few years already, but we met just after his arrival and soon also started working together. Truth is that Franz had a crush on me so at first it was more of an excuse to spend time with me I think. To this day, our skills and creative vision complement each other really well so working as a team makes perfect sense.
Where do you usually take inspiration from?
Franz: I always find this a difficult question. It feels like ideas just pop up and we tend to have more ideas than time to realise them all. I guess our main influences come from internet culture and stuff we find on the street. We often quite literally stumble over inspiration. For example our Pizza Banana we found at a festival in Berlin.
Ilka: We do a lot of portraits but rather than just showing a person we like to control and direct the outcome and to conceptualise it in some way. So often there is a concept and everything else – subject, styling, props, etc – follow.
Ilka&Franz – Banana
What do you want to communicate through your pictures?
Ilka: I think there are two sides to our work. On the one hand it’s humorous and quite the opposite of serious. It’s also superficial in the sense that it doesn’t explore any deep issues or concerns. But at the same time we always try to get something real out of our subjects. And each individual portrait is very personal. We take a lot of time to get that out of each person. This can be very hard with professional models, who are used to not showing who they really are. I guess we like to show the surreal in real people.
What do you think are the ingredients for a good picture/project?
Franz: Uh! I think we are still working on cracking the code because we keep adding criteria. Our work is very directed and controlled and the elements we control must be the ingredients to what we consider a good picture: subject, styling, expression, pose, mood, light, angle and post production. There are probably even more and you can tell we are control freaks! 🙂
Why are you mostly interested in portraits?
Franz: I think for most photographers one of the first big challenges is to figure out what they are most interested in, to develop a creative voice basically. We did that by trying loads of different things from fashion to still life and back. Today we do mostly portraits but our style is applicable to objects and even animals too. We see our creative vision more in the minimalism, conceptualism and colours.
Which is the connection between the protagonist of the picture and the colours you use?
Ilka: All factors really play together. We plan colours ahead of the shoot based on the theme, the person, clothes and props. Often this is led by the concept but can also be influence by the personality of the subject. Our portrait of Camilla Rutherford for example portraits her in a gently, classic and feminine way. We always adjust and align colours in post but in her case we actually changed them completely to bring out her character more. We just did a portrait of the British author Kathy Lette. She is a very outspoken, positive and witty person so we shot her on red, wearing a pink leopard blazer (love!) and holding a giant red pencil.
Ilka&Franz – Camilla Rutherford
We are very fashinated and curious about your series of portraits for La Monda Magazine. What is the concept behind this project and where did the idea come from?
Franz: That is, hands down, one of those ideas that just happened. Ilka shouted it across the room to me one day and I shouted back OK! and so we did it. We basically wanted to do a series of quite close-up portraits of people who had just eaten something really messy. It’s a simple idea but it illustrates well how we work as we planned out the different foods, their colour, the colour of the clothes and background and which people would work best with each food. I particularly like the orange spaghetti sause with the green t-shirt and background.
Final question, What are you working on at the moment and which are your plans for the future?
Ilka: We have just finished a number of commissions for a creative agency and a designer and also the celebrity writer mentioned earlier and are also finishing up a personal project that will come out soon and is crazy, weird and…surprise!… colourful!