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Anoush Abrar and Aimée Hoving met as photography students at the University of Art in Lausanne, Switzerland. Anoush is from Iran and Aimée is Dutch, and the two began working together as a team in 2003 after having finished art school. Currently, they both live in Switzerland. |
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Why Not Mundane? – Anoush Abrar & Aimée Hoving
Anoush Abrar and Aimée Hoving met as photography students at the University of Art in Lausanne, Switzerland. Anoush is from Iran and Aimée is Dutch, and the two began working together as a team in 2003 after having finished art school. Currently, they both live in Switzerland.
What brought the two together was an interest that they shared—one of portraying groups, communities or circles of people whose images are otherwise inaccessible to the mainstream public.
Photography, for them, is a means of extracting a maximum amount of detail from their chosen subject, and they do so by entering into their subjects’ private spheres, in order to show the way people really are, and without adding props. Both have worked individually and together on intimate projects in which social portraits are used to express a certain feeling.
Besides the commissioned work, the pair is currently working on their first collaborative project entitled “Diplomatic Diversity.” In this attempt, they hoped to highlight the significant role of the women in the diplomatic sphere and to display the vast cultural treasure of the diplomatic circle of Geneva by portraying the wives of ambassadors of the United Nations in a book of portraits. This project has generated much interest in Geneva and has gained widespread support.
The pair’s favorite subject matter, however, remains fashion photography because of its inherent creativeness—this field allows them to fully explore a no-boundaries type of photography. As much as there are no limits to what fashion designers can put up on the runway, so too are there no limits to the ways in which these sometimes extravagant creations can be shot on film. The mundane can be made to look exotic, the exotic crazy or, then again, why not mundane?
