One half of the photography duo Petrovsky & Ramone talks fashion, police training dogs and Evil Twins

Interview by Anna Langer, photo by Wouter van den Brink

I love snowboarding and I love being in the mountains… Unfortunately I only get to go once a year, like your typical snow tourist. But I started skiing when I was 4 years old and have been snowboarding for seven years now I think. I also thought about snowboard photography but it’s quite an insider game I guess… Maybe some day, the combination with our work now would be really cool for a shoot, girls in fashion dresses making big jumps…

I met Morena [the other half of the duo] working as an assistant for a photographer and spent four years with her there, we took care of the equipment together, shared hotel rooms while we traveling and at one point we started taking pictures together. The birth of Petrovsky & Ramone.

Sometimes we shoot with one camera, sometimes with two, depending on the project. But the most important things are always communication/ideas and the process before and after a shoot. When we travel and are on location we shoot with two cameras, while in a studio it can vary from one to three. It’s fun, dynamic.

The reportage style is used more and more, but it’s hard to hit the right tone, so it doesn’t look fake-ish. We look for interesting situations and place a model/character in it, and then a whole new story unfolds. That’s fun to see, as without the shoot that story would have never been there.

A good friend of me suggested meeting up with Danny from Bataleon. We already had some ideas in mind for skateboards, but it was quite a hassle so we went for this instead. Even though we connected immediately, Danny feared that the scene wasn’t ready for photos on snowboards yet and so we just stayed in contact until Danny got stuck in NY last year due to that huge ash cloud.

He started playing with our images and then there it was, our first Evil Twin Artists Edition. The photos are all from different shoots (well almost) and all tell their own story. The girl being choked and the “Gods Child” tattoo are from a story we shot in Venice Beach. The Girl with the US flag is Alexandra, an amazing model and friend of ours who was shot at the Salton Sea, where we did a shoot for a Dutch and Australian magazine. She’s also one of the kissing girls (part of our ongoing project to film and photograph people kissing) and the one smoking, shot in Carlsbad for a story for GEIL magazine. The screaming girl (singer BIA) and the dog are from Amsterdam. The dog is also the only photo we took especially for this board, Danny wanted a dog so we found a police dog training school and went there one night, so cool!

The design is quite far off snowboarding, literally, but I think the vibe inside is similar… All our work goes back to the feelings of LOVE and WAR, contrasts and confrontation… Being out there, pure and finding yourself. Fighting for inner freedom. Breaking through. Releasing energy. Freedom… Loosing yourself to be yourself. What do you see in it?

Check more of their beautiful work on petrovskyramone.com and follow their adventures through their diary on shotby.nl/blog