5 min read
You can immediately tell an Inez & Vinoodh photograph the minute you see it: the model Christy Turlington perched on a tree branch, her head cocked at a slight angle, her head creating an illustrated shadow (or is it a hole?) from where something is oozing. The model Colette Pechekhonova lying on a bed in a black pinafore and white tee, her hair perfectly sprayed over the pillow; though she is in repose, she commands the same power as a military portrait. (And are we seeing her from above or from below?) Björk on the cover of Vespertine, wearing the iconic Marjan Pejoski swan gown, asleep or in the throes of passion, her arm bent over her face, mirroring the shape of the swan’s neck around her own, an illustration of a swan overlaid on top.
What all these photographs have in common is a sense of fantasy that is nonetheless grounded in reality, a feeling that sometimes borders on the uncanny. They are also always beautiful—often in unfamiliar ways that will draw you in closer to show you something new about the world or about yourself.
Christy Turlington, photographed for a 2001 Balenciaga campaign created with the graphic design studio M/M Paris, who are frequent collaborators with the photographers
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
ME #10, 1998
Colette Pechekhnova, photographed in repose
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
A show currently on view at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands gathers a lifetime of photographs by Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin under the name “Can Love Be a Photograph,” a fitting title for the work of the Dutch duo, who are partners in work and love. It is, in many ways, an immersive experience into the world they have created throughout the past four decades.
“We love people, we love looking at people, and we love talking to them and learning from them and also heightening them to this ultimate version of themselves—or to something that we project onto them—which is obviously what happens in a fashion picture, where you have a character in mind and you ask the model to embody it,” Inez explains on a video call from the couple’s home. “We’re always moved by the fact that someone opens up to us that way, even when it’s 15 minutes with a celebrity.”
Kate Moss, photographed for Harper’s Bazaar, 1999
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
Charlotte Gainsbourg, photographed for Harper’s Bazaar, 2000
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
Taylor Swift and Benjamin, photographed for Time magazine, 2023
Their portraits convey a new kind of intimacy. Suddenly, you are seeing people you have seen a million times before—Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Taylor Swift—in a completely different way: softer or bolder or at peace, like they are aware of the viewer’s own gaze and they welcome it. This is likely an effect of the duo’s process: They take pictures simultaneously, a practice they stumbled upon early in their careers, during a Harper’s Bazaar shoot photographing the French actress and musician Charlotte Gainsbourg. “We had an extra camera on a shoot that we were going to try out, and I didn’t feel like going through it and testing something new, and Vinoodh [decided to test it],” she recalls. “The pictures were incredible; it was like now we have two opportunities, two sets of eyes, two brains, two pictures of the exact same thing, the exact same moment, and that opened up many possibilities and a sense of freedom and less stress, because we know one of us will always have [the shot].” In 2013, they photographed Prince for V Magazine—one of the last portraits of the artist. They captured him simultaneously regal and saint-like, but his softened gaze revealed something beyond romantic.
Beyond conveying the disarming energy that being in Inez and Vinoodh’s presence as they dance behind the camera can have, their work stands out because of their way of manipulating images—a digital version of analog collage techniques that they began experimenting with back in 1991, in the days before Photoshop. (“It was done on Quantel Paintbox,” recalls Vinoodh.) “We were commissioned to make this calendar for a city in Holland, and we went there and photographed all the sites where we were planning to come back with models,” Inez explains. “Of course, the day we went back—as is typical in Holland—it rained, it was gray, it was miserable, nothing worked. So then I remembered the computer. We decided to shoot the girls in the studio, mimicking the light of the locations as we had photographed them when it was sunny.” They combined the images on the computer, and the rest, as they say, is history. “We were excited immediately by the weird, hyperrealist strangeness of it—the effect that it had with this super sharp background and the super sharp foreground, which you never could have in a photograph.”
Although digitally manipulating images has since become standard practice in the world of photography—and beyond—their intent has always been different. “When we started in the ’90s, a photograph was still seen as the truth,” Inez adds. “From day one, once we encountered the possibility of the computer, we said, ‘No, already by lifting your camera and framing [the photo], you’re already manipulating the truth.’ We were taking one, two, three, four, five, six steps further to try to bend reality to what we want to see, disrupt or destroy the parts that interest us, and make it all look by hand.” Vinoodh adds, “When you know it’s AI, it’s a joke, and we’re not really into the joke. Our whole thing was that in our image, you never know what’s the real and what’s the unreal.”
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
An early photo blurring the line between fantasy and reality, 1994
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
Another early photo that blurs the line between fantasy and reality, 1999
A test Polaroid for Björk’s Vespertine, 2001
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
Kate Moss test Polaroid, 1999
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
“A lot of people ask us about AI, but for us it’s the process that counts,” Inez continues. “It’s about being on set with the person we’re shooting, with the teams, with the styling or the writer or whatever is happening that day. It’s that exchange and that energy that’s the most important for us. Maybe there are people that are really happy just typing prompts into a computer. It’s just not our process. It’s not our life.”
But even in the world of AI and manipulated images, there is still one type of photograph that has come to symbolize a kind of truth: the Polaroid. The exhibition also shows 200 of their test Polaroids, or quick images that photographers usually take before they begin shooting in earnest in order to establish that everything looks the way they mean it to look.
“It is one of people’s favorite rooms in the exhibition because now they know what they are seeing is real,” relates Vinoodh. “There is this hunger for what is real in humans.”
ME #02, 1998
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
ME #04, 1998
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
Photo: Courtesy of Inez & Vinoodh
A look inside “Can Love Be a Photograph” at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag