• The son of a New York tailor, Hermeilio Miguel Aquino was raised in the city’s South Bronx, and began studying acting and film directing while still in his teens.
• Since gaining his BA at the Drama Centre London, Kino has established himself as a leading fashion and advertising photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker.
• He is the director of the short film Wearing Thin, winner of Best Drama at the 2022 Soho London Independent Film Festival.
• Kino is a Nikon European Ambassador and teaches a fashion styling and photography course twice a week at the London College of Fashion.
• Major advertising clients include Fender, Sony Music, Pantene, Jaguar, Range Rover, Warner Music, Kite Eyewear and Aussie Hair, and his fashion images have been published by Vogue Italia, Vogue India, London Evening Standard and Contributor.
Fashion is a fickle and fast-moving temptress that shakes off her clothes and shoes as quickly as she tells us to buy and adore them.
Today, banner advertising on social media platforms is more influential for branding success than any spread in Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar. For photographers, the success of a fashion shoot is not measured so much by the quality of the lighting, or even the styling of the model and her clothes. No, in this era of Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, an agency measures success by the number of images – sorry, assets – churned out in a single day under the studio lights. As Hermeilio Aquino tells me: “People want loads of different content, they want it yesterday, so as soon as you get the images you have to edit them and send them across and it goes live on social immediately.” Phew!
Unsurprisingly perhaps, Aquino sounds like a young
