Interview conducted on March 4, 2023
by Ryan Lowe, edited by Ben Pigott
Ryan: You’re a full-time photographer, tell me more about who you are and what you do in fashion?
Richie: I’ve been working as a photographer since I was like 8. I’ve always been really focused on this one medium, this and film were sort of my two mediums growing up. As a child, I always really wanted to make films. I didn’t have the means to do so, the production value would be so low and I was really frustrated, as a child. There was this one time when I used all my legos to make a Titanic movie, my dad filmed it and showed it back to me and I was like, ‘It doesn’t look real.’ It was just in my bathtub and I was expecting, like, full Hollywood production. That disappointment was so intense, I was like, ‘Wow, it looks so cheap. Why can’t I do that?’
RL: Where are you from?
RT: I was born in Idaho. I lived in Hawaii for a year growing up. I’ve lived in New York for 13 years and I just moved to Paris. I was back and forth to Paris but now I’m officially here full-time since January. It’s still sort of starting here for me.
RL: What is your fashion background? Any education?
RT: I went to FIT and Cooper Union as well. Cooper Union is a really small, really small school, one of the smallest in the country and one of the hardest ones to get into in the world, because it’s free. I went to FIT for 2 years and was studying photography. I didn’t really alter, I’m still very hellbent on photography.
RL: I read you view yourself as a director, any films or directors that fuel your creativity?
RT: I watch a lot of films and there are always sort of characters that I’m emulating or showing to the models to sort of embody. There’s this scene from ‘Birth’ by Jonathan Glazer, it’s a very Prada movie. It’s with Nicole Kidman and she has this pixie cut in it, she’s so beautiful. She loses her husband and then ten years pass. After those ten years, a ten-year-old boy comes to her door and says, ‘I’m your husband, reincarnated and I’m in love with you,’ and all this stuff. It’s a crazy movie but it’s really good. There’s a scene where she kind of starts to believe him, she’s in an audience and you see the full audience and then it slowly zooms in to her, all of the emotions going through her head. It’s intense, it’s good. That’s more so for model direction. It’s always a collage of different sources and different movies.
RL: When was your first photo shoot that it all clicked?
RT: There were shoots I did in high school where I was really trying to emulate and be like Miles Aldridge, he was my hero at the time. I have this really strange allegiance to Miles Aldrdge, I always go back to his work, it’s so produced. There were images where I finally cracked his way of shooting by using really rudimentary tools. I had handheld flashes that I was putting in different places, totally amateur. I kind of got that look and was really happy as a teenager. His new work is more hyper-color but at the time it was really cinematic. I knew his work but I didn’t know Helmut Newton and all the people who influenced him. I love Helmut Newton but I’m of the Miles Aldridge generation so I didn’t see Helmut Newton growing up.
RL: A whole range of photography from you in a short amount of time, from magazine editorials to accessory shots, to making your own book: what is your favorite style of photography & why?
RT: I think the reason why I do so many different things is because I would get really bored if I didn’t. I need to bounce around and play with a lot of different subjects. I think that’s sort of changing, as my work moves to be more art driven, they're even more narrative-based–almost like comic book stills… which is coming as a teaser I guess.
RL: Do you have a team?
RT: Yes, I would be nothing without my team. I’m lucky enough to have really, really great assistants, stylists, makeup artists, and people who support me in what I’m trying to do.
RL: Campaigns with Prada, I must know more…
RT: There was a campaign for the Chinese New Year, I had actually done that product for Prada as well in the store… every time I shoot for Prada it’s at 4 AM, it’s really funny. We were shooting in the store, after hours, using the store’s topography. The first Prada campaign was done through a creative agency called 2x4 and that was when people were starting to take Instagram content very seriously. Right in 2016 where everything was shifting to that arena. It was just me and my old creative partner and an assistant and we basically tied down the clothes using a fishing line, as flat to the surfaces as possible.
RL: You’ve had a recent shoot for HighSnobiety in which the muses in every image are crying with a small camcorder in the bottom left corner. It felt very Y2K; I loved it. Especially seeing it circulate all over the internet at the beginning of February…
RT: It was the magazine’s idea to have the muses crying, it was their first beauty issue. They wanted to talk about this phenomenon of Gen Z turning on the camera when they’re crying, showing the world when they’re crying. These images of Bella Hadid where she’s sobbing to the camera, they wanted to do something about that. That concept was probably lost on people without reading the article about it. I had initially taken the images of the cameras to be facing the people, overlaid on top of the faces, I isolated them and told them to lay them out. Natasha Stagg wrote the quotes – the little poems.
RL: Do you have a routine that helps you create better work?
RT: When there’s a big creative output expected of me, I usually slack on healthy things. I give myself leniency…
RL: Tell me some of your favorite fashion designers…
RT: I really like Stefan Cooke, Jonathan Anderson, and Miuccia Prada is my all-time favorite. I think that’s the trifecta.
RL: Tell me some of your favorite photographers…
RT: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Darren Aronofsky as a director, Jonathan Glazer as I mentioned before.
RL: What do you want to work on in the future? Anything you can share you’re working on currently?
RT: I’m working on a show right now, more arts-driven images that are really narrative-based. They feel like film stills or sketches from a comic book. I’ve been developing this work for about six months, hopefully, I’ll be exhibiting it around April.
RL: Any advice to people in the world who are less fortunate but want to get into fashion photography?
RT: Libraries have a lot of magazines, they’ll have Vogues from the 1920s to now. Those are all free ideas. Dreams are an underrated source, not to get super metaphysical but it comes directly from your own subconscious. I got into lucid dreaming and I was lucid dreaming and I was in a library, I was able to look at the images in the library in my dream and those are all free ideas to use, directly from my subconscious. Dreaming in a larger sense of the world is an important part of the practice.