A selection of images from Italian photographer and art director Francesca Forquet. Forquet attended the Academy of Belle Arti in Bologna, Italy and went on to work on photoshoots for newspaper, magazines, and fashion designers. In 2017, she moved to Santa Monica, California to work as an art director creating posters for movies. At the beginning of 2019, Forquet decided to return to her original passion of photography full time. Her subsequent projects and reportages offer a personal commentary on the social environment or events that surround her. “Santa Monica” is an on-going series based on Forquet’s fascination with the residential neighbourhoods and deserted alleyways she’s walked through since moving to the city. It is here that she finds the clues — objects, messages — that she believes reveal something about the people and country she is trying to get to know. For Forquet, human beings are driven by a constant need to express themselves, most often through the possession and display of objects they believe reflect something about their individuality:

“At times, I act as a vehicle and I amplify the voices of these people…. At times, I play with these images and, through the association or contrast of them, I create new meanings or expose their contradictions, I pair and match the images to emphasize the ironies or I isolate and extract them from context to create other concepts or symbols. Indeed, the collection of these photographs reveals to me a very playful, sometimes, ironic, sometimes funny, surreal aspect of the people in Santa Monica, a city that seems completely ordinary, sometimes even boring, where you rarely encounter much human presence during a regular walk. These photographs are portraits, even if there are no people, these are the portraits of us, the citizens.”

Check out more from Forquet’s project below! You can also find various other iterations of these images, including video/still life versions, on her Instagram as she has been exploring this topic with a mix of her regular digital Canon, Mamiya RZ67 (film) and iPhone.