Inez and Vinoodh's New Book Celebrates Four Decades of Groundbreaking Photography
A new book titled Can Love Be a Photograph: 40 Years of Inez and Vinoodh, published by Hannibal Books, showcases the iconic work of Dutch photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. This publication, accompanied by an exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag until 6 September 2026, features a collection of celebrity portraits, surrealist visions, and a profound meditation on love itself, spanning their 40-year career.
Redefining Photography's Boundaries
For four decades, Inez and Vinoodh have redefined the boundaries of photography, blending art, fashion, and portraiture into a visually seductive and intellectually disruptive body of work. Their images often stretch to the edge of believability, challenging photography's claim to truth and prompting viewers to reconsider both the image and their willingness to believe it. Driven by pioneering uses of photography and a radical rethinking of classical identities and stereotypes, their practice remains consistently surprising and innovative.
Portraiture with Tenderness and Transformation
In their portraiture, Inez and Vinoodh resist documentary reduction, portraying subjects with tenderness, dignity, and care. Series like Post Power feature men such as Brad Pitt and Bill Murray appearing soft, vulnerable, and ornamental, with flowers woven into beards adding a melancholic touch. Their subjects are not humanised through demystification but transformed through amplification, capturing cultural figures and exquisite flowers as larger-than-life icons or deities in series like Still Life, Worship, and New Gods.
Collaboration and Surrealist Techniques
While known for pioneering digital manipulation, Inez and Vinoodh also employ traditional modernist techniques like photomontage and collage, often through collaboration with photographers, stylists, makeup artists, and others. This multimedia layering creates a unified vision, treating the human body in a surrealist manner—stretchable, rearrangeable, and emotionally charged. Their work destabilises how we read beauty, identity, and the body, oscillating between the sublime and the grotesque.
Longterm Relationships and Self-Insertion
The duo maintains longterm collaborations with figures like Cindy Sherman and Lady Gaga, emphasising co-creation and trust in their artistic process. They also insert themselves into their work, challenging conventions and expanding dialogue between photography, fashion, and art. Their recent series, Think Love, depicts the love between their son Charles and his partner Natalie Brumley, echoing their own relationship and affirming photography's role in visualising emotional and relational connections.
Photography as a Transformative Practice
Inez and Vinoodh argue that photography's most profound task is not to show the world as it is but to visualise how we are shaped by the technologies through which we see and connect. The exhibition and book do not resolve photography's ambiguities but inhabit them, proposing that love, like photography, is a relational, risky, and transformative practice. Text by Margriet Schavemaker accompanies the images, all credited to Inez and Vinoodh.
