Hermeilio 'Kino' Aquino

He is a fashion photographer, film director, cinematographer and actor. But far from being a jack of all these many trades, Hermeilio Aquino is a proven master of each. Better known as Kino, he reveals his latest ad campaigns to Keith Wilson and why he wants to do more social photography shoots...

- Hermeilio Aquino

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 man in a hurry when he recounts his various jobs from the previous month, including a shoot here in the UK for Land Rover Jaguar, as well as 10 days in the Philippines on assignment for the World Bank and Nikon. The son of a New York tailor who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, Hermeilio (aka Kino), is clearly a man on the move. Even his declaration of being London-based is qualified by the words “at the moment”…

You say ‘at the moment’. Where else do you have in mind?