ROUSE & JONES

ROUSE & JONES are a Los Angeles-based creative duo focused on fine art photography. Writer/director Mitch Rouse and photographer/producer Brittany Jones collaborate to build a new fictional history of fashion and cinema through still photography, combining style elements from various eras and taking a filmmaker’s approach to illustrating a narrative. ARTISTS' STATEMENT: Our passion for vintage fashion photography and love of films from the Golden Age of Hollywood led us to collaborate on our fine art photography series’. What drives us is the challenge to combine these two related but separate mediums in a way that is unique in process while maintaining beauty and narrative within a single frame. We compose our images using a cinematic approach; first by writing an original script that includes setting, action, and dialogue, and then directing actors through their lines and movements as we photograph the unfolding scene. Several “takes” of each scene are photographed, shooting from different angles and using multiple lighting setups. We allow the actors to improvise in order to heighten the realism of the images.

GRAND CENTRAL CONNECTION is a story of a young writer with a relentless case of writers block. Day in and day out he rides the train and scours the platform for inspiration but each day leaves him disappointed. The mundane nature of the travelers and white-collar businessmen lends no aid to the writer’s creativity – everyone is trying to fit in with one another, blend, while being herded like livestock into the train cars. Until one evening, the writer’s muse crosses his path. We collaborated with designer Genet for this series featuring her strongman suit design, K.O., for our female lead. We aren’t just two photographers working together.

We are a writer/director and producer photography duo collaborating to build a new historical landscape of cinema. Instead of interpreting the past or re-creating films that already exist, we are molding a new fictional history of the American film noir genre: a combination of classic filmmaking and lighting techniques with a modern approach to photo shoot production and direction. The aim for each image is to depict a narrative in the film noir style within the space of a single frame.