Inez and Vinoodh, in your opinion as photographers, is reality important when we’re thinking about art?
Inez van Lamsweerde: Not in our opinion! We’re not excited by reality, we never were. The idea of a photograph as a purveyor of truth, for us, was always questionable, because you point your camera and you decide to take the picture of something and not to take a picture of something else, you’re already manipulating reality.
Vinoodh Matadin: And if you think about it, reality always changes. So, what is reality?
IVL: Exactly. When we started working with the computers in the early nineties, we realized that we can form reality into whatever we wanted. We’ve shot girls in a studio and then put them on a beach or in a disco. We love this uncanny feeling that makes you look at a work of ours and go, “Wait — I’m seeing something real, but it can’t be real. Something is strange here.” There is a joy in being able to disrupt reality, to shoot it and then through digital manipulation, change it again.
If, as you said, photography is not the purveyor of truth, what is it the purveyor of?
IVL: For us, it’s love. We always talk about Simone Weil’s statement that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity — this is how we experience taking a picture. Someone will come into our studio to be photographed, and immediately we are thinking, “Okay, what does this person need from me right now? What lifts them up? What constructs them anew? What is the thing that’s so magnificent about them that we want to heighten?” We are trying to ask ourselves: how do we truly see this person in our view? And then it’s that interaction, these sort of arrows of energy that go to that person. And then what comes back through the lens to us is this beautiful exchange of trust and attention and collaboration.
“We are trying to ask ourselves: how do we truly see this person in our view?”
Think Love, 2025 © Inez & Vinoodh
How does the exchange shift when you photograph someone you know? For example, you shot your son and his girlfriend last year in a series called Think Love…
IVL: It was, I think, one of the most beautiful experiences of our career. We shot it in Marfa on the new Apple iPhone Pro Max, and we were quite a small team on location, so we could really focus on them, on capturing the moment between them… It was a really interesting way of encapsulating not just them but a generation of 21-year-olds who really value their emotional connection and the support that they have for each other; this true love, this true connection.
You once described your photography process as letting go of your ego in order to have an exchange with your subject.
VM: Absolutely, it involves full focus on that person in order to get back the kind of amplified, heightened version of this person that we see through the lens.
IVL: We always say that every photo is a self-portrait, but through other people’s features and bodies. We give something and they give something back. But if we give nothing, nothing comes back. It’s almost like a meditation and a hypnosis at the same time, because we cancel ourselves out, but at the same time, hypnotize the other person into their most magnificent form, and we register that back. And it doesn’t stop there, because then when the photo is finished and hanging in a gallery, the viewer meets that person as well. It’s triangular dynamic.
VM: And it comes back to what we said earlier about generosity through attention. The photo goes straight through your heart, and you’re mesmerized. With our new retrospective, Can Love Be a Photograph, at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, we felt that even more. Some people cried when they saw it on the opening night.
IVL: You could feel the love and the emotion, not just in the photos but in the museum itself, through the viewers and the audience.
Sasja 90-60-90, 1992 © Inez and Vinoodh
How was it for you to bring 40 years of your work together in one space?
IVL: It’s been two years in the makings, two years of looking through 40 years of work and then distilling the themes that keep coming up constantly and then allocating works to them. The show is organized thematically rather than chronologically so it was really an exercise for us to dive deep into our work, to explore the ideas that keep coming back in our photos. It’s been so incredible for us to have the opportunity to pinpoint what we’re about. It’s wonderful to learn from your own work.
What kind of things have you learned about yourselves through that process?
VM: We’re basically still doing the same thing we did when we were 20 years old. It’s just getting more refined. For example, in the beginning we would put like 40 ideas in one picture, but then over time, you learn to do one or two ideas per picture and then save the rest for the next one. You’re learning to be more precise.
Well Basically Basuco is Cocaine mixed with Kerosine, 1994 © Inez & Vinoodh
We can definitely sense the presence of many ideas in your early work with digital manipulation, like in your 1994 photo, Well, Basically, Basuco is Coke Mixed with Kerosene. It explores so many different themes: science, technology, fashion and beauty, sex…
IVL: We’ve always set out to play with many influences and ideas. We love when a photo throws you a little question of whether it’s real or not real. Or when you can’t quite tell whether you’re attracted to what you’re seeing or whether you’re repulsed by it, where there’s something that puts you off, like with our Thank You Thigh Master series. It’s this ambiguity that we feel is always sort of present in our work and made us freer as artists and as people working in the fashion industry. We’ve never wanted to limit ourselves.
Thank You Thighmaster: Joan, 1993 © Inez & Vinoodh
Thank You Thigh Master is one of my favorite series of yours — that dichotomy of being repulsed and attracted is really captivating.
IVL: Yes, we were artists in residence at PS1 in New York in 1992 and it was our first time there. We watched a lot of television, it was the birth of the Internet, but it was also the start of things like the CNN 24-hour news cycle. So, news became entertainment, essentially. And you know, as we watched television continuously and saw all the ads coming up in between the news, most of them were for fitness equipment, plastic surgery, creams, quick fixes… We started realizing that there is so much focus on physical perfection, yet everything is going to go through a screen, through a computer. Why would you need this perfect body when you are actually not able to have it be touched by someone?
VM: So, we played with that idea and the fact that people are spending so much time on their outer world not their inner world. We found these old mannequin dolls whose facial expressions were frozen, and we grafted the skin of the model that we shot in the studio over the mannequin faces.
It’s coming back around to the idea of distorted reality that we mentioned earlier.
IVL: Yes, it’s these humans that are perfect, but cannot have any physical contact. Their emotions are there, but they cannot get out, they can’t be expressed. Looking back on it, it was very much a premonition! Everything is through screens now and people are lonelier than ever.
It must be very grounding for you to continue to work with people on a set, to make these real connections and exchanges in your work and also with one another.
IVL: Absolutely. And we each have a camera when we shoot, so there’s always a moment of like, “Oh, what are you doing? What are you making? Okay, let’s go in that direction.” Because we’re on set together, we’re learning from each other that way, as well as from the person we are photographing. This exchange is why we are in it for 40 years, it’s about capturing the magnificence of humans.
