We were lucky to catch up with The Richters recently and have shared our conversation below.

The , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Despite having done personal projects documenting generally ignored realities of society, surely the one that could have the most media relevance is documenting weddings. Weddings continue to be a very significant point in people’s lives, however, because they are such an ancient ritual, they continue to be impregnated and sometimes too rigidized by the weight of tradition. Our relevance in this world of weddings lies in the fact that we have represented love around the world in an honest way, outside of clichés and far from all the predictable images that we are used to seeing. The media generally continues to show a conservative and naive version that does not correspond to the reality of society, unifying couples and rituals, instead of celebrating individuality. Faced with this, we offer a representation that we believe is more accurate of society today. Feminism is stronger than ever, diversity is claimed and couples want to celebrate their weddings according to their personality by creating their own ritual. With our images we claim strong women, full of charisma, who assert themselves for their values and not just for being a pretty, delicate and fashionable object. We are proud to make couples happy because they feel represented and inspired by our work. We are also proud to serve as an inspiration to hundreds of fellow photographers and videographers around the world, having been invited to speak about our work for over 10 years.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

The Richters are Monica Muñoz y Pablo Rodríguez (aka PoL). Originally from Chile and Spain, we’ve met in Mexico in 2017. (due to a wedding photography and videography conference where we were invited individually) .

About PoL: It took me some time to realize that I needed to dedicate myself to something that would fulfill me completely. So much so that I almost had time to finish my Civil Engineering degree in my city, Granada. I learned filmmaking basically by doing films. I worked as freelance for small brands and ads agencies, until I created my previous brand. This was around 2011. Since then, I dedicated myself to filmmaking and specially to weddings. I always sought to document love in a way that felt as real as possible to me.

About Mónica: I was born in Caracas and then I moved to Santiago de Chile at the age of 10th.
In Chile, I studied photography at the University (later I will tell you why I studied Photography in the first place) and then I taught Reportage classes there. Before weddings, I worked as a photographer in all the areas that you can imagine: journalism, sports, music/concerts, events, archives, pets and family. I even was a paparazzi for a newspaper.10 years ago I create The Wild Brides, my first wedding photography project where I wanted to depict powerful and charismatic women and how they get married.

The problem we solve: Usually more modern and well visual and cultural educated people has problems finding photographers and videographers with the right skills to document their wedding in a way that doesn’t feel cheesy, naive or staged. We offer them to document their wedding in a way far from trends that reveal this lack of visual and documentary culture and focusing in portrait them in an honest, raw and vivid way. We accept weddings as the beautiful chaos they are, life is beautiful enough not to fake it. Our pursuit is to document what makes people unique instead what the trends and the wedding industry make with the couples: Unified them in a predictable way. Not every woman want to be a model or a princess, as Giorgio Armani said: “Elegance is not catching somebody’s eyes, it’s staying in somebody’s memory.”

These couples are usually creatives: Art directors, cinema producers, designers, musicians, artists and people with a high curated art taste.

We are proud to still inspire not only couples but to other colleagues in the wedding scene by staying true to our personal vision. We believe that it is important to have been published (VOGUE) with work like the one we do in magazines that clearly have a more classic and unified editorial line. To provide not only a service but a statement.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Being appreciated by your own vision. The wedding scene can be overwhelming, specially because the social media. You find the same images over and over, all the wedding related instagram feeds look basically the same. When a trend comes (i.e editorial style) everyone accept it and reproduce it without even thinking if this really resonates with them in someway. So basically a big part of the peers do weddings to feel creative but the truth is they are not expressing themselves and they feel lost. To have a voice and being understood and celebrated because that is really rewarding.

How’d you meet your business partner?

We had our own personal brands before founding The Richters. Thanks to this we were invited to give talks to share our visions. In 2017 we were invited to Querétaro (Mexico) for an international conference of wedding photographers and videographers (BodaF). When we greeted each other for the first time we felt a strong immediate connection, it really felt like an earthquake. That’s why we call ourselves The Richters, like the scale that measures the strength of earthquakes. A wedding is in a way a release of energy so it’s up to us to be those machines that measure the impact in the form of images. It didn’t take us long to create the project since we shared the same vision, in fact when listening to each other’s presentation it seemed to us that we had plagiarized each other. We had the clear vision of continuing to represent love together in an honest and real way for people with our same way of seeing things.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.onlytherichters.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onlytherichters/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onlytherichters
• Other: https://vimeo.com/onlytherichters

Image Credits
Personal Photo: Guido Harari www.guidoharari.com