‘People take something like 1.5 trillion selfies a year. It’s a way for them to say I exist, I am worth being seen,’ Dutch artists and photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin (who labored with Wallpaper* to create a portfolio of US creatives for our August 2024 concern) inform me. We are sitting collectively in a quiet facet room on the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, inside their newly opened exhibition Can Love Be A Photograph which surveys forty years of their work as artists, trend photographers, and filmmakers. ‘A picture is never real life. It’s all the time the selection.’ Their want to seize a dwelling, respiratory sense of actuality inside the nonetheless picture is obvious. ‘Putting someone in a white studio with an expensive coat… that’s not our world,’ they clarify. ‘We want context. We want to build a reality around the person.’
The exhibition is organized intentionally out of chronological order. Photography and movie works (together with music movies for Björk, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga) are grouped as a substitute by theme: the actual and the unreal, humanity and the pure world, trend’s constructed realities, gender fluidity, and the playful subversion of gender codes. ‘We keep saying it’s not likely a retrospective. It’s a future perspective,’ Inez explains that the exhibition took two years to place collectively. ‘When we went back into the archive, we found so many ideas that made us think, we could take this further. Every work in the show feels like an idea for something we might still develop.’
Me Kissing Vinoodh (Lovingly), 1999
(Image credit score: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh, from ‘Can Love Be a Photograph: 40 years Inez & Vinoodh’)
The exhibition opens with Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately) (1999), a large-scale portrait of Inez kissing Vinoodh who has been digitally eliminated. Her face strains ahead, eyes shut and lips pierced in the direction of her lacking companion. Her profile pulls into jagged misalignment. To create the work, Inez and Vinoodh used the Quantel Paintbox (an early predecessor of Photoshop) experimenting with bodily distortion and digital intervention.
‘Even although we have been utilizing a brand new instrument – the pc – the work was by no means about creating half-man, half-machine hybrids,’ they clarify. ‘It was psychological. We have been exploring mutations of the thoughts, making seen on the floor what’s hidden inside.’ At the time, Inez described the piece merely, that eradicating Vinoodh from the kiss revealed how destroyed she can be if she misplaced him. The exhibition catalogue – which incorporates an interview of the artist duo with Tilda Swinton – cites Henri Bergson philosophy that the current is all the time permeated by reminiscence as an inspiration for the work. Looking on the altered portrait, the viewer virtually instinctively reconstructs the lacking determine. The thoughts restores what the picture withholds. The kiss is just an imagined embrace.
(Image credit score: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh, from ‘Can Love Be a Photograph: 40 years Inez & Vinoodh’)
Another gallery is dedicated to The Psychomorphic Phenomenon, a sequence from the early Nineties. Here, Inez and Vinoodh started probing how inside states may form and warp outer appearances. ‘From the start we realised the second you decide up a digicam and level it someplace, you’re already manipulating the viewer,’ they clarify. Using picture manipulation instruments, they experimented with what images may reveal past the floor. One sequence depicts grown males lounging towards the clean whiteness of a studio backdrop. Their garments are easy, virtually understated, aside from their meticulously manicured nails. The Final Fantasy portraits of youngsters, whose harmless smiles have been digitally changed with the grins of grownup males, are unnerving. And but the distortions by no means learn as gimmicks or visible methods. Unlike contemporaries who used digital instruments for perfection or glamour, Inez and Vinoodh used them to discover the exact second that identification slips. ‘We favored that folks didn’t know what they have been ,’ they are saying. ‘That second of hesitation, that’s the place the {photograph} lives.’
Vivienne Westwood Fur – Kym, 1994
(Image credit score: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh, from ‘Can Love Be a Photograph: 40 years Inez & Vinoodh’)
Surrealism is used as a instrument, to not distort actuality, however to disclose how we really expertise and work together with the world. Another sequence depicts feminine fashions stripped of their gender. Long earlier than mainstream media embraced conversations round gender fluidity, Inez and Vinoodh have been drawn to tales of identification as regularly altering. ‘I used to be studying about cross-dressers within the ’90s, of males who wore girls’s garments at residence to really feel extra in steadiness,’ Inez says. ‘It made me realise the psychological energy of clothes.’ Their fascination with this began with the onset of the web, which democratised connection, and allowed anybody to be whomever they needed to be.
‘Because of digital life, you may be any particular person now. You may be feminine, you may be male, you may be trans, you may be something.’ Throughout their portraits of well-known actors or pop stars, males seem delicate and susceptible. Brad Pitt is photographed at his most diaphanous; a wistful Bill Murray with flowers threaded via his beard, whereas girls usually assume traits historically coded as masculine, as in Lady Gaga inhabiting her alter ego Jo Calderone, with slicked-back black hair, bushy sideburns, a swimsuit and white shirt, and a cigarette dangling from her mouth.
The spiralling affect of the web, the unfold of deepfakes, and the speedy rise of AI have made it increasingly difficult to trust whether images of people are real or artificially generated. I ask them what they believe the future holds. ‘The younger generation doesn’t trust anything anymore,’ they observe. ‘That makes real-life experiences more valuable than ever.’
They also sound a warning about the hidden environmental cost of AI and the vast networks of servers, energy, and water that sustain it. ‘People think it’s cheap, but it’s actually incredibly expensive. It’s going to tip the balance between our cheap solutions and depleting our natural resources.’ Defining their future work is the Dreamscape series, in which models inhabit fantastical, otherworldly environments, creating a visual terrain where ecological and digital realities merge into a single unstable plane. In a world shaped by misinformation and environmental uncertainty, this vision feels necessary.
Well Basically Basuco is Coke Mixed with Kerosine… – The Face, 1994
(Image credit: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh, from ‘Can Love Be a Photograph: 40 years Inez & Vinoodh’)
Another gallery is devoted entirely to their editorial work, with magazine spreads and fashion campaigns plastered across the ceiling, floor, and walls, with endless publications displayed in vitrines. Portraits of artists, pop stars, and models from Kate Moss, Addison Rae and Billie Eilish, alongside early campaigns for Helmut Lang, Tom Ford, and Chanel fill the space. For Inez and Vinoodh, a fashion campaign is a chance to world-build, creating a constructed reality shaped around the human at its centre.
‘For us, the experience with the person who sits in front of our lens is why we’re still here 40 years later,’ they say. ‘It’s the connection we establish almost instantly when someone walks in for a session with us.’ That sense of connection extends far beyond the studio. They have built a world around their practice, and a community that is clear at the exhibition opening. The exhibition rooms are filled with friends, collaborators, and creative partners who have shaped Inez and Vinoodh’s universe and who clearly cherish the work they’ve made together. Designers Haider Ackermann, Viktor and Rolf, and Michael Kors mingle with models such as Natasha Poly, singer and actress Lou Doillon, former Editor-in-Chief of Vogue Paris, Emmanuelle Alt, Tilda Swinton’s stylist Jerry Stafford, while ANOHNI performs.
Roos and Anne Catherine – Balenciaga Campaign, 1999
(Image credit: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh, from ‘Can Love Be a Photograph: 40 years Inez & Vinoodh’)
I ask Inez and Vinoodh how they met, and how their working dynamic continues to function, both as long-time collaborators and as a couple. They met at the Fashion Academy Vogue in their hometown, Amsterdam, and initially studied fashion design. ‘I was looking for a photographer for a fashion show,’ Vinoodh recalls. ‘Someone asked, Do you remember Inez van Lamsweerde? She’s a talented photographer. I said, Of course I remember her! so I called her.’ Inez remembers the moment too. ‘I want to see the clothes first, and I said if I like them, I’ll do it. And I want to get paid.’ They laugh as they retell the story. The connection, they say, was immediate. ‘When we were working together that day, we felt instantly aligned. Everything clicked… and we also kind of fell in love right away.’ Their working dynamic has barely shifted since. ‘There’s an energy line between us and the person in front of the camera. We work as one body, and we each have a camera. One of us directing, one of us moving, but really it’s a single rhythm.’
It is clear that photography, for Inez and Vinoodh, is a regenerative practice. A reciprocal act of love between the two of them, their subjects, and ultimately the viewer. Photography, in their hands, is not a record of appearances but of relationships, documenting the emotional charge between people, the exchange of trust, the act of truly seeing and being seen. Photography is a democratic medium – anyone with a phone can take a picture and billions of images circulate freely every day. Yet rather than diminishing the medium, this ubiquity underscores what their work insists on: that photographs are valuable because they capture a moment of connection. Their own fashion images acknowledge that same desire, and redirects it toward something more intimate and humane. Their recurring ideas, of gender fluidity, image manipulation, the malleability of identity, stem from this belief that photography is a living exchange. ‘It’s not about male or female,’ they say. ‘It’s about the beautiful complexity of humanity: its fluidity, its contradictions, and its love.’
‘Can Love Be a Photograph: 40 years of Inez & Vinoodh’ at Kunstmuseum Den Haag till 6 September