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.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF INEZ & VINOODH
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.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF INEZ & VINOODH
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.”
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: Inez van Lamsweerde
ME #04, 1998: Vinoodh Matadin
PHOTO: COURTESY OF INEZ & VINOODH
