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A new book celebrating four decades of fashion photography duo Inez and Vinoodh features celebrity portraits, surrealist visions and a meditation on love itself
‘How we connect with each other’ … Think Love, 2025. Photograph: Inez van Lamsweerde/Vinoodh Matadin/Inez and VinoodhThu 2 Apr 2026 08.00 CEST
Well Basically Basuco Is Coke Mixed With Kerosine, the Face magazine, 1994
For 40 years, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin have redefined the boundaries of photography. This iconic duo, born in the Netherlands and hailed for their fusion of art, fashion and portraiture, have created a body of work that is as visually seductive as it is intellectually disruptive. Can Love Be a Photograph: 40 Years of Inez and Vinoodh is published by Hannibal Books. An accompanying exhibition is at Kunstmuseum Den Haag until 6 September. Text by Margriet Schavemaker. All photos: Inez and Vinoodh
Kate Moss, Harper’s Bazaar, 1999
In this book, we encounter images stretched to the very edge of believability. Time and again the artists challenge photography’s claim to truth, prompting us to reconsider not only the image itself but also our own willingness to believe it. Their practice has remained consistently surprising, driven by pioneering uses of photography and a radical rethinking of classical identities and stereotypes
Bill Murray, New York Times Magazine, 2004
Inez and Vinoodh portray their subjects with tenderness, dignity and care. In the series Post Power, men appear soft, vulnerable and ornamental: Brad Pitt at his prettiest; a melancholy Bill Murray here with flowers woven into his beard
Drew Barrymore, AnOther Magazine, 2005
In portraiture, Inez and Vinoodh resist documentary reduction. Their subjects are not humanised through demystification, but transformed through amplification
Eniko for Peace, Self Service, 2008
For the exhibition and this book, Inez and Vinoodh selected 16 themes through which they trace connections within the vast body of images they have produced. A central focal point is the stubborn status of photography as a herald of unquestioned truth
Björk, Interview Magazine, 2009
While Inez and Vinoodh are widely known for their pioneering use of digital manipulation, more traditional modernist techniques, such as photomontage and collage, have played an increasingly crucial role in their practice. Often, this explicit and multimedia layering is the result of collaboration. Photographers, stylists, makeup artists, hairdressers, lighting technicians, graphic designers, editors and clients converge to create a unified vision. Inez and Vinoodh offer their images as a canvas, or even as a cadavre exquis, inviting others to intervene
1 Pitcher Plant, 1 Purple Iris, 1 Lady Slipper, 2013
In portrait series grouped under titles such as Still Life, Worship and New Gods, cultural figures as well as exquisite flowers are captured as larger-than-life icons, deities or spectres, figures suspended between individuality and projection. To be photographed is not to be revealed, but to be reconstituted. Photography here functions as a technology of transformation rather than representation
Fashion Plate No 3, 2020
The overarching surrealist strain in Inez and Vinoodh’s work can be described as conceptual rather than decorative, less about dream imagery for its own sake, more about destabilising how we read beauty, identity and the body. Their work treats the human body the way classic surrealists treated objects: stretchable, rearrangeable and emotionally charged. Mannerisms and gestures, size changes and repetition lead to startling imagery that seems to be oscillating between the sublime and the grotesque
Gaga and Inez, V Magazine, 2015
They maintain longterm relationships with collaborators such as Cindy Sherman and Lady Gaga, underscoring the central role of co-creation and trust in their artistic process. Equally significant are the moments when Inez and Vinoodh insert themselves into their own the work, challenging conventions and expanding dialogue between photography, fashion and art
A$AP Rocky, RZA and Rihanna, Vogue UK, 2023
The documentary function of the photograph has long been considered the medium’s primary virtue. To reduce photography, however, to a mere objective window on to the world does a disservice to both artist and viewer
Think Love, 2025
Think Love, their most recent series, depicts the love between their son Charles and his partner Natalie Brumley, echoing their own relationship 40 years earlier. Think Love affirms Inez and Vinoodh’s core thesis: Photography’s most profound task is not to show the world as it is, but to visualise how we are shaped, emotionally, bodily and relationally, by the technologies through which we see and connect with one another
Taylor Swift and Benjamin, Time Magazine, 2023
This exhibition and publication do not resolve photography’s ambiguities; they inhabit them. They propose that love, like photography, is not a stable object but a practice: relational, risky and transformativeExplore more on these topics
