Forty-two years ago, Inez van Lamsweerde – then a willowy, 21-year-old student at the Amsterdam Fashion Academy – walked into a life-drawing class. Vinoodh Matadin, two years her senior, was the (fully clothed) subject, standing on a table. “I remember the door opened, and she arrived dressed completely in black,” says Matadin. “I was like, ‘Who the hell is that?’” The whole class noticed their connection, he insists.
On a Sunday morning in Paris, I can sense it, too, as Matadin smiles across the breakfast table at van Lamsweerde. They became a couple six years after they first locked eyes, began to work together a year later, and have since developed a joint photographic language that is as distinctive as it is influential. In the ’90s and early 2000s, their campaigns for Balenciaga and Yohji Yamamoto, starring models Christy Turlington, Hannelore Knuts and Maggie Rizer, captured the mood of an era. More recently, their celebrity portraits have gained cult status: Taylor Swift with a cat draped around her neck like a shawl; Lady Gaga with three heads; Hunter Schafer and Michaela Coel swathed in furs. Their work from the past four decades is the subject of a major retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands, opening 21 March.
When they first started out, it was van Lamsweerde who was behind the camera (while the pair worked together on everything from casting to art direction); then, in 2000, a shoot with the late stylist Melanie Ward introduced them to the potential of digital. While van Lamsweerde stuck steadfastly to her Hasselblad, Matadin picked up a digital camera for the first time. It established their now well-known synchronisation. “From that moment on, Vinoodh started walking around and shooting different angles, different positions and moments,” she says. “It became the perfect balance; we each capture different emotions.”
Both now in their 60s, they grew up in Amsterdam. Van Lamsweerde was raised by her single mother, the fashion journalist and illustrator Clementine van Lamsweerde, and always wanted to be a photographer. Matadin began his career as a fashion designer before the two teamed up and moved to New York for an artists’ residency. They never left. It’s where they raised their son, 22-year-old Charles Matadin (taking him on shoots with them from the age of three months) and where their Labradoodles live.
When we meet at their Paris apartment, Matadin is youthful in a T-shirt and jeans, his hair a little scruffy. Van Lamsweerde, poised in head-to-toe black, does most of the talking. They admit that they are always together – except when they go to the dentist, says Matadin, smiling but serious. Their working dynamic is perfectly aligned; the domestic one, somewhat less so. “Making decisions about normal stuff is hard. When we have to choose a coffee maker, forget it,” he laughs. “We go to Bed Bath & Beyond and leave with nothing,” agrees van Lamsweerde.
They sign all their work as a single creative entity, Inez & Vinoodh. Love is central to all their images. It’s also the overarching theme of the Kunstmuseum show, titled Can Love Be a Photograph: 40 Years of Inez & Vinoodh. “When we take a photograph, it is an act of love, an act of attention, and truly seeing the other person,” says van Lamsweerde. “The exhibition is a testimony to everyone we’ve ever loved and given attention to, including each other.”
The exhibition is arranged thematically, exploring notions of identity, gender and beauty across 18 rooms. Many of the images are also decidedly ambiguous: simultaneously beguiling, seductive, familiar and unsettling. Take their career-catapulting series For Your Pleasure, published in The Face in 1994. The images combine shots of glossy fashion models with generic stock imagery: office interiors and screensaver-worthy beach scenes. “Both the model and the background are equally sharp to give it this hyper-realist, uncanny feeling,” says Matadin. The results, both glamorous and absurd, call into question representations of femininity.
“Inez & Vinoodh turned fashion photography into an artistic medium,” says Mathias Augustyniak, one half (alongside Michael Amzalag) of creative agency M/M (Paris), which has collaborated with the duo for most of their career, often overlaying collaged and hand-drawn elements over their images. For Donatien Grau, head of contemporary programmes at the Musée du Louvre, “their work is a clear manifestation of the power of photography – not to render a reality, but to open up to another reality that shines back onto the world in which we live”.
They were early adopters of image manipulation, and the line between what is real and what is artificial is often blurred. In one image in the show, Swiss model Vivienne Rohner poses in a catsuit in a midcentury kitchen, her waist slim, her right hip distorted to an exaggerated scale. “It makes you look twice: are you repulsed, are you attracted?” says van Lamsweerde.
Whether they are playing with proportions or shooting straight-up portraiture, “it’s staged photography; it’s never real”, says Matadin. “We always say that the moment you point your camera, you’re making a choice to manipulate the truth.” Physical poses and creative props often lend their images a surrealist slant: Natalie Portman with an unidentified hand resting on her forehead; Bill Murray with tiny fake flowers seemingly growing out of his beard.
Van Lamsweerde explains their process: “We sort of hypnotise the person into the best version of themselves. Then we try to get as much [personality] back through the expression and the eyes.” The couple views every portrait as a self-portrait – a projection of their thoughts and feelings. The focus can be intense and intimate, but that is the intention. “We don’t like to ‘steal’ a moment,” she says. “We don’t like to trick people into doing something they don’t want to.”
Supermodel Christy Turlington, who has been photographed by the duo since the mid-1990s, for everything from Balenciaga ads to Vogue Paris spreads, attests to their skilful approach. “By the time we met, I had worked with everyone I’d wanted to; I didn’t think I could bear to see another photograph of myself,” she recalls. “But somehow they managed to see me differently than I had seen myself. I felt safe to take risks. Normally it would take years to build up that level of trust.”
More recently, their son Charles, a multimedia artist, has been a subject of their work. Last year, he appeared in an Apple-commissioned project, Think Love, a triptych that will feature in the exhibition. One image shows Charles and his girlfriend, artist Natalie Brumley, locked in a passionate kiss beneath a sheer red veil. It pays homage to Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss but also to Inez & Vinoodh’s celebrated self-portrait Polaroid series from 1999: Me Kissing Vinoodh (Lovingly) depicts the couple mid-embrace. In Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately), Matadin has been digitally removed, leaving van Lamsweerde kissing the air. “It was really about the fear of losing the other person,” says van Lamsweerde. “When you’re so strong together, that thought is unbearable.” So, can love indeed be a photograph? “It’s not a question,” she says. “It’s a statement.”