For Inez & Vinoodh, Every Photograph Is an Act of Love

After 40 years of photographing some of the world’s most iconic figures—Yves Saint Laurent, Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, the late Lee Alexander McQueen, and so many more—Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin are pressing rewind on their illustrious artistic career. The duo opened a major retrospective on March 21 at The Kunstmuseum at Den Haag in Amsterdam, their hometown. Named Can Love Be a Photograph, the show features 18 galleries filled with works the artists have created since meeting in 1986 and starting a shared partnership that extends far beyond the four corners of a frame.

“We fell in love the moment we met, but each had our partners already,” van Lamsweerde tells W in a recent interview with Matadin. “But it took about six years of working together, being friends, not being friends, before we could actually fully admit to each other that this was the way to go. From that moment on, we’ve been inseparable.” They’re not exaggerating, during the course of our interview, they finish each other’s sentences and utter the same words simultaneously, nodding their heads in unison. “One body, two brains. That’s how simple it is,” Matadin says with a shrug.

Over four decades, the pair honed a style all their own, channeling their love and familiarity in black-and-white portraits of Prince, Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, and Iman. But Can Love Be a Photograph focuses on much more than just their commissioned celeb work (although, to be fair, there’s much of that in the exhibition: an entire room called The New Gods is devoted to their photos of pop-culture figures like Tilda Swinton, Billie Eilish, Kate Moss, and Rosalía). Van Lamsweerde and Matadin are the kinds of artists who don’t fear change or technological advancement—they rejoice in it, then apply it to their work. “We were one of the first to use the computer for creating artworks as well as fashion works,” van Lamsweerde says. Running images through a computer led the pair to ponder reality vs. surreality, another major theme in their work. “In our photographs, there are always these opposite forces of the quotidian and the uncanny, keeping each other in balance.” Naturally, analog gets its due, too—there are two galleries featuring Inez and Vinoodh’s famed Polaroids.

The artists are known for their Kiss series, which depicts the couple mid-lip-lock. This show includes three photographs from The Kiss, including an image Inez and Vinoodh shot of their son, Charles, kissing his girlfriend, Natalie, in Marfa, Texas, beneath a crimson veil, which van Lamsweerde describes as a “membrane of protection of their intimacy.”

“For us, the act of taking a picture is an act of love,” she goes on. “It’s saying, ‘I value you. You are being seen, you’re being appreciated.’ Simone Weil had this really beautiful statement: ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ This has been our experience from day one, and it’s what keeps us going.”

“It took a year and a half to figure out this show,” Vinoodh adds. “It was really incredible to have the time to revisit your own work.” But importantly, the two don’t consider this a retrospective, per se. “We see it as a new baseline from which our future will take off,” van Lamsweerde says.