Inez & Vinoodh celebrate their 40-year career with a major exhibition in Amsterdam

‘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 worked with Wallpaper* to create a portfolio of US creatives for our August 2024 issue) tell me. We are sitting together in a quiet side room at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, inside their newly opened exhibition Can Love Be A Photograph which surveys forty years of their work as artists, fashion photographers, and filmmakers. ‘A picture is never real life. It’s always the choice.’ Their desire to capture a living, breathing sense of reality within the still image is clear. ‘Putting someone in a white studio with an expensive coat… that’s not our world,’ they explain. ‘We want context. We want to build a reality around the person.’

The exhibition is arranged deliberately out of chronological order. Photography and film works (including music videos for Björk, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga) are grouped instead by theme: the real and the unreal, humanity and the natural world, fashion’s constructed realities, gender fluidity, and the playful subversion of gender codes. ‘We keep saying it’s not really a retrospective. It’s a future perspective,’ Inez explains that the exhibition took two years to put together. ‘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.’

The exhibition opens with Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately) (1999), a large-scale portrait of Inez kissing Vinoodh who has been digitally removed. Her face strains forward, eyes shut and lips pierced towards her missing partner. Her profile pulls into jagged misalignment. To create the work, Inez and Vinoodh used the Quantel Paintbox (an early predecessor of Photoshop) experimenting with physical distortion and digital intervention.

'Even though we were using a new tool – the computer – the work was never about creating half-man, half-machine hybrids,' they explain. 'It was psychological. We were exploring mutations of the mind, making visible on the surface what is hidden inside.' At the time, Inez described the piece simply, that removing Vinoodh from the kiss revealed how destroyed she would be if she lost him. The exhibition catalogue – which includes an interview of the artist duo with Tilda Swinton – cites Henri Bergson philosophy that the present is always permeated by memory as an inspiration for the work. Looking at the altered portrait, the viewer almost instinctively reconstructs the missing figure. The mind restores what the image withholds. The kiss is only an imagined embrace.

Another gallery is devoted to The Psychomorphic Phenomenon, a series from the early 1990s. Here, Inez and Vinoodh began probing how inner states could shape and distort outer appearances. 'From the beginning we realised the moment you pick up a camera and point it somewhere, you’re already manipulating the viewer,' they explain. Using image manipulation tools, they experimented with what photography could reveal beyond the surface. One series depicts grown men lounging against the blank whiteness of a studio backdrop. Their clothes are simple, almost understated, apart from their meticulously manicured nails. The Final Fantasy portraits of children, whose innocent smiles have been digitally replaced with the smiles of adult men, are unnerving. And yet the distortions never read as gimmicks or visual tricks. Unlike contemporaries who used digital tools for perfection or glamour, Inez and Vinoodh used them to explore the precise moment that identity slips. 'We liked that people didn’t know what they were looking at,' they say. 'That moment of hesitation, that is where the photograph lives.'

Surrealism is used as a tool, not to distort reality, but to reveal how we truly experience and interact with the world. Another series depicts female models stripped of their gender. Long before mainstream media embraced conversations around gender fluidity, Inez and Vinoodh were drawn to stories of identity as continually changing. 'I was reading about cross-dressers in the ’90s, of men who wore women’s clothes at home to feel more in balance,' Inez says. 'It made me realise the psychological power of clothing.' Their fascination with this started with the onset of the internet, which democratised connection, and allowed anyone to be whomever they wanted to be.

'Because of digital life, you can be any person now. You can be female, you can be male, you can be trans, you can be anything.' Throughout their portraits of famous actors or pop stars, men appear soft and vulnerable. Brad Pitt is photographed at his most diaphanous; a wistful Bill Murray with flowers threaded through his beard, while women often assume traits traditionally coded as masculine, as in Lady Gaga inhabiting her alter ego Jo Calderone, with slicked-back black hair, bushy sideburns, a suit and white shirt, and a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

The spiralling influence of the internet, the spread of deepfakes, and the rapid 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.

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.

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 until 6 September