In the Spotlight: Luigi y Luca

As part of our mission to bring you a slice of the world, via the homo-neurotic perspective, we’re continuing a series of interviews in which we feature exciting, new artistic talent. This time around we’ve jumped the pond to catch up with Italian artistic duo Luigi and Luca. Their photography explores themes ranging from the complexities of modern gay relationships to the battle against sexual repression.Join me for a look.

S: Where are the two of you from and where do you live now?

LyL: We are from Italy; I’m from the north [Luigi], Luca is from the south. We met three years ago in Florence in a cruising club where I was DJing. We lived in Florence, then we moved to Madrid and now we are in the states until November. After that, we do not know; it’s another jump in the dark.

S: How long have the two of you been working together as artists and how did your collaboration begin?

LyL: We got together two years ago; I was a photographer and Luca was studying painting at the academy of Florence. After a vacation in the States we decided to convert the energy of our relationship into art; that was one year ago. For now we have just explored the medium of photography but we want to explore more…

S: How do you think your relationship with each other influences your photography?

LyL: Yep, obviously. Every picture is talking about us, about our relationship — even if they can be read in a more general universal way, they are developed as an image of our situation as a couple. So I can tell they have a sort of chronologic order, they are changing and growing up with us. Sometimes we just follow a visual intuition without awareness, but at the end the image is talking about what is happening between me and Luca, our couple’s dynamics, our problems, our limits. In a certain way they can be read as a diary, but nobody knows it yet. We just let the photos talk for themselves — they are evocative and surrealist for a lot of people, but in the easiest way they are a metaphor for our situation as a couple. So, if I can quote two of my favorite songs, I would say that love will tear us apart but art will be the bomb that will keep us together. I guess it is working as a therapy for us, especially in this period.

S: What contemporary artists and photographers do you turn to for inspiration for your work?

LyL: We don’t have artistic fathers. I won’t say we are orphans, but even if we are interested in what’s going on in the art scene, we do not take a lot of inspiration. I can tell that without [Robert] Mapplethorpe and [Arthur] Tress, our eye would not be the same — even Greg Gorman, who is a dear friend of ours that taught us a lot about photography and light studio, influenced our black and white and the elegance in our images. And we would say even Slava Mogutin, for the sexual tension in his pictures.

S: Soft-core kink that is simultaneously tender appears as one of the themes in your work. What sort of thought process goes into styling these shots?

LyL: I think it is how I said before — we are what we represent in our images, even if we talk about different themes and how we are related to these themes. For example, in one of our first shots, “Love is a dark hole”, we just wanted to express how we feel as a new generation of gay couple, and how we feel different from the past generations (represented by the glory hole in the bathroom). The paradox is in the situation; the linguistic game does the rest. We are always facing a dark hole looking for answers from this part of the wall. It’s the questions that are different. Other themes are, for example, the sexual repression of a dogmatic culture, as in “The flying carpet”, which has a mix of Islamic elements in it, or for example in “Growing up” we talk about how hard it is for a teenager to know their own body and feelings. The expression ‘I kiss my elbow’ in Italy means like doing something kinda impossible. So I guess we play with words and situations to build our images. In “Learning” we talk about the process of knowing that for us it involves first of all the body, the awareness of being here now and to subvert the macho, patriarchal, oppressive culture — as we say, it teaches more taking things up the ass than reading the bible.

S: You’re represented by Group Model Management. Do you find that involvement in modeling influences your photographic style?

LyL: We’ve been modeling before starting work together. We like to pose for the projects we like. We weren’t working a lot with Group because we do not like give our face to commercial things. We said ‘No’ many times. We like fashion when it’s an expression of an idea. When it’s just about industry we like it less and we don’t have so much fun. The fashion photography is boring and narcissistic, so we did some fashion shots ourselves for Carlos Diez, a Spanish stylist. The pictures were so explicit that no magazines wanted to publish them, but we had an exhibition in his boutique and it was a success.

S: Your work has been featured in publications, including Pref magazine. How do you feel your photography careers are going so far?

LyL: That’s just the beginning; we feel very far from where we want to arrive…

S: What types of projects do you have planned for the next year?

LyL: Avoid the break-up, a short movie (we are working on the screenplay now), making new Fotoromances (our photo story), find a new place to live, quit smoking even if we like nicotine a lot, look for a new haircut, find a good gallery, buy the new Nikon d700, and then whatever comes to our mind.

S: Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?

LyL: Oh yep, there’s something. The editor of Pref just wrote us yesterday; the magazine was blocked in Switzerland because our pissing picture is against the Swiss law. Now the lawyers are working on that. We defend our art against the accusation of pornography. We think we are very far from offending someone with our images — we are not doing pornography even if we watch it a lot.

Thanks guys! To see more of Luigi and Luca’s work, check out their webpage and their blog. I, for one, am eager to see where their careers take them.