The celebrated photography duo is unveiling a new body of work, highly personal and shot entirely on an iPhone.
“Photography is a great way to express your love for someone,” said Inez van Lamsweerde. “You fall in love with the person you photograph in two seconds.”
We’re standing in a gallery in New York, where van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, partners in art and life, were walking me through their new body of work. The group of photographs centers on a young couple, their 22-year-old son Charles and his girlfriend Natalie, captured in moments of tenderness against the backdrop of the Marfa desert. The young lovers’ intimacy is heightened by the sheer sweep of the natural landscape.
It’s a personal outing for the Dutch photography duo known professionally as Inez and Vinoodh, who have built their name on a surreal blend of fine art and fashion. But it was also a technical revelation: the images—popping with lush colors and acute in detail—were shot entirely on an Apple iPhone 17. “It’s just pure creativity,” said Matadin of his experience with the device’s camera; van Lamsweerde called it “a game-changer.”
The project is emerging as part of “Joy, in 3 Parts,” a new exhibition spearheaded by the tech company and curated by Kathy Ryan. It encompasses iPhone-shot works by Inez and Vinoodh, as well as those by American contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas and Beijing-based photographer Trunk Xu, all of whom have responded to Ryan’s single prompt, “Joy.”
The photography couple’s contribution, Ryan told me, is unlike anything you’d find in a family album, a series that “celebrates the love story of their kid.”
Created over two days in Marfa, on the range of Virginia Lebermann, cofounder of Ballroom Marfa, the images unfold a narrative that alludes to the 1970 cult film Zabriskie Point, in which a man and woman meet and fall in love in the shadow of societal unrest. The photographers, however, offer something far more hopeful: “Instead of being expelled from paradise,” van Lamsweerde explained, “maybe they’re returning to paradise.”
Inez and Vinoodh, Think nature (2025). Photo courtesy of the artists and Apple.
The first picture depicts the lovers in a town setting running toward their sun, their hands joined and clutching a billowing red fabric. Another composition sees them share a kiss under the same veil, an empty road unraveling behind them. In a third, they stand on cacti-dotted terrain, recreating a pose seen in the Zabriskie Point film poster, with Natalie holding up and peering out from behind a deep red gel. The hue, said Van Lamsweerde, represents love as much as a stop sign, a red-flag warning of environmental fragility.
The triptych is bookended by two individual black-and-white photographs of Charles and Natalie. The portraits are “kind of another way of saying I love you,” said van Lamsweerde. That emotional undercurrent reflects her and Matadin’s focus on a sitter, she explained—fleeting yet charged, an exchange of energies not unlike the experience of love.
“It’s a very short, intense moment that you share with someone of extreme trust and vulnerability,” she said. “For us, that’s something very sacred.”
A Shared Brain
Inez and Vinoodh’s shared practice began with their own love story. The couple met in 1986 as students at the Vogue Academy of Fashion Design in their native Amsterdam, when she was commissioned to photograph his clothing line Lawina. The label would shutter, but their relationship blossomed. In the ’90s, they decamped for New York, on the heels of van Lamsweerde’s residency at PS1. There, they married and built a joint career on the back of their electric, kinetic compositions.
The pair’s early pictures showed up in the pages of fashion magazines, notably The Face, and it wasn’t long before fashion houses from Chanel to Calvin Klein came calling. They would go on to direct music videos for the likes of Rihanna and Lady Gaga, forge a long-running partnership with Björk, and continue creating fine art photography that saw them variously experimenting with collage and developing floral still lifes.
The duo, represented by Gagosian and The Ravestijn Gallery, have gone on to show internationally, in institutions from Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum to New York’s Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art. A 2010 survey, “PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING 1985–2010” toured cities including Sao Paolo, Stockholm, and Dallas.
An Inez and Vinoodh image has come to be immediately recognizable for its drama and immediacy, for harboring unlikely, even unreal elements. See, for instance, their 2019 image of fellow photographer Cindy Sherman, in which she shows up in an elaborate mask and luxurious outfit while dining out on a bag of chips. Or their cover art for Anohni’s 2016 album Hopelessness, where the musician’s face is eerily composited with that of model Liya Kebede.
During the walkthrough, Ryan and the couple recalled a 2004 shoot with Bill Murray at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. The actor arrived flagrantly late to the session, where van Lamsweerde proposed sticking flowers in his beard for the photos. His response? “Does anybody ever ask why?” Van Lamsweerde said no; Murray allowed flowers to be stuck in his beard.
That aesthetic emerges from the duo’s background in fashion as much as an upbringing that saw them immersed in art history. Matadin told me about visiting Amsterdam museums as a child, taking in “all the Rembrandts, all the Vermeers—it’s all in our brain.” Van Lamsweerde herself can see how the “frontal view” of their images, how their images are framed, takes cues from the Dutch art. Their photo of Charles and Natalie kissing, they said, nods to Gustav Klimt’s 1907–08 masterpiece The Kiss.
Otherwise, the pair told me, their creative methods and processes have evolved out of pure instinct and spontaneity. Their set usually sees van Lamsweerde shooting from a fixed point, while Matadin wanders around with a camera, capturing different angles. But not before she directs the sitter, an undertaking she described as “massaging, hypnotizing someone into a certain shape.”
“There’s never a stolen moment,” Matadin said.
“A lot of people say it’s like watching choreography,” van Lamsweerde added of their process. “We just feel it and at this point, we have the same brain.”
A Self-Portrait
Their in-the-moment practice has found an unexpectedly fitting companion in the iPhone camera. The duo raved about its flexibility and how it’s allowed them to capture intimacy, the iPhone being less intimidating than an actual camera. The advanced settings of the latest model also means that they’ve been able to navigate complex lighting and exposures. “It all happens in the camera,” said van Lamsweerde.
A section of the exhibition is occupied by a HDR (High Dynamic Range) gallery, where the photographs are displayed on screens in stunning resolution with technology developed by Apple. Here, the colors emerge bright, with textures and skin tones rendered with supreme detail—”the shadows not too dark, the highlights not too bright,” van Lamsweerde noted. In one image, Matadin pointed out a shadowy figure reflected in a piece of Natalie’s jewelry: “You can see us here in her ring.”
It’s far from the only Inez and Vinoodh self-portrait in the gallery. In fact, as Matadin contends: “Every picture we take is a self-portrait. The more we put our energy on a person, the more you will see of us.”
“It’s a complete projection of our own self and ideas about everything,” van Lamsweerde said. “Then one thing comes back through the other person.”
Their art, then, is as revealing of their sitters as it is of the photographers. In their “Joy” series, for one, can be read their parental love and unparalleled eye as much as their innate feel for technology (it’s worth noting that the duo was early to adopt Quantel Paintbox, a Photoshop precursor). “It’s us,” Matadin put it plainly.
Charles and Natalie’s images also echo Inez and Vinoodh’s own body of actual self-portraits, in which the couple have photographed themselves laughing, embracing, and of course, kissing over the years. It’s a throughline that fittingly arrives as the pair are planning a major retrospective at the Kunstmuseum in the Hague, Netherlands, set to open in the spring of 2026. The show has the provocative title of “Can Love Be a Photograph,” with their four-decade practice offering the clearest response.
“We’re always looking for something new,” Matadin said. “That’s what keeps us going.”
“We always say you can take a good picture of anyone because there’s something amazing in everyone,” van Lamsweerde added. “There’s always a new person in front of you.”
“Joy, in 3 Parts” is on view September 19–21 at 456 West 18th Street, New York. The exhibition is open 12 p.m.–6 p.m. on Friday, and 9 a.m.–6 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
