Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello - Coco in the bathtub 2

Love and photography. It all started in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Sofia was studying film while Mauro was playing in a rock band. They met and started taking pictures together, the results of which were published in local magazines.

They then flew away to Paris where they soon won the 2002 Picto Prize for young photographers. This led to an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the start of collaboration with Citizen K magazine. They take their pictures with a distinct style, possessing just the right amount of color, a splash of surrealism, intelligent references and a perfect sense of dress.

It’s no surprise that the pair currently work for the world’s hottest fashion magazines: Numéro, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Flair, Russian Vogue, Ten, and Vogue Nippon. The “Coco in Bathtub” series was featured in the French style bible Numéro. Sofia Sanchez and Mauro Mongiello’s work is rich with fantasy reference.

It evokes the pre-Raphelite imagery of John Everett Millais’Ophelia and Tennyson’s Arthurian poetry, as well as more recent work such as Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk as photographed by Annie Leibovitz and Mena Suvari’s iconic rose-petal scene in the film American Beauty. The series focuses on female sexuality; Notice the ecstatically half-opened mouth, which is an established visual shorthand for sexual desire, as well as the fabrics turned diaphanous by the water.