The Image Makers: Inez And Vinoodh
Husband-and-wife photography team Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin sat down with Style.com on set for a revealing interview about their process, their partnership, and their decades-long career. This month, Taschen publishes Pretty Much Everything ($700,
www.taschen.com), a retrospective of their greatest work to date (and a project prescribed by no less than Karl Lagerfeld himself). Here, van Lamsweerde and Matadin reflect on 15 of their most iconic shots, from their favorite portrait of Kate Moss to the shot they say changed their lives.
At exactly 34 characters long, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin easily have the longest photo credit in the business. Admittedly, the count includes A-N-D, but that little linking word is crucial. Van Lamsweerde and Matadin are partners in every sense—creatively, romantically, as parents of their 9-year-old son Charles Star Matadin, and seemingly everything in between. The Dutch natives have been together for 26 years, and to sit with the two of them for an interview is to witness genuine sentence-finishing synergy.
There’s yet more neat duality in their work, which straddles art and fashion, gives you high glamour with a touch of the surreal or grotesque, ranges from classical black-and-white portraiture to near camp, and inevitably includes some degree of gender-bending. It also extends to their hefty new monograph, called Pretty Much Everything ($700,
www.taschen.com), which comes out this month and encompasses their work for magazines like Paris Vogue and V, campaigns for houses like Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, and their art projects. In the two volumes, van Lamsweerde and Matadin scrapped chronology, and instead painstakingly went through the 666 photographs to create very specific pairings, each with their own visual logic. “It takes time away so it becomes one body of work,” explains Matadin. “You see a picture from 1985 next to one from 2011, and they’re still holding up.” Van Lamsweerde and Matadin talked to Style.com about their unique relationship, the wonders of Lady Gaga, and why you shouldn’t peer into the inner workings of a fashion shoot.
—Meenal Mistry
You have this book now but you had the retrospective exhibit last year in Amsterdam. Had you always planned to do that at 25 years?
Vinoodh Matadin: This actually started nine years ago when Inez was pregnant. Karl Lagerfeld said, “Oh, you’re pregnant. You should do a book.”
Inez van Lamsweerde: He said, “Oh, you have to have a project while you’re pregnant.” Which is very cute.
And very Karl.
IVL: Yeah, it was sweet. So we started working on it and kept shooting and kept adding pictures and the book grew and grew. When it was done, it was kind of 25 years of us together. And by now, it’s again a year later so it’s 26 years of work together. But the show was based on the book.
VM: Basically we started the book putting everything in order.
IVL: Chronological order.
VM: But then we thought, it’s too soon. We’re not there yet. So we decided to redo the book.
IVL: The exciting thing for us was the editing and putting it together. Once we decided no chronological, which for us was not interesting, it became really about the combination of the pictures.
The pairings have a nice rhythm.
IVL: It’s really about how all those images that we’ve made in the past 26 years live inside our heads, especially this idea of art, fashion, and portraiture being all the same, from the same source. It really depends on the context or the venue in which you see the image.
VM: It also became one body of work because it takes time away. You see a picture from 1985 next to a picture of 2011 and they’re still holding up. You don’t know when this picture is from. It could be yesterday or 26 years ago.
It’s true. Other than Final Fantasy and Thank You ThighMaster, it’s hard to tell.
IVL: That’s what was really exciting for us also to discover while we were making it. Like, wow, there’s still the same inspiration going on or similar body language. Or the same people that we’ve been shooting for such a long time.
The Kissing pictures seem like a no-brainer for the covers. Was that always the choice?
IVL: Yeah. Like you said it. They stand for everything—us, our love, two people, two volumes, the way that those three pictures have evolved. The last picture [on the outside cover] especially, you know, was made for Lanvin Homme (left)—something that started as an art piece became an ad campaign and ended up as a silk screen and became an artwork again for the show. It’s full circle.
You give every subject a name in your book but you also name models, which is rare. They’re usually nameless. I’m interested in the way that you relate to models, because it’s a bit different from other photographers.
IVL: They’re people!
VM: People always ask us, what kind of pictures are you doing, and I say, “We photograph human beings.”
IVL: It’s an exchange of inspiration, of trust. You spend a day together and definitely anyone that poses for anyone is in a very vulnerable position. It’s not nothing to let yourself be photographed. We approach everything that we do with as much respect as we can possibly have for the person that we’re photographing. That’s also why in most of our images there’s a big awareness of the person knowing what’s happening.
I suppose that explains the way that nudity and sexuality exist in your work. It’s definitely sexy but there’s a kind of strength to it. I guess because the girl is aware.
IVL: And in control. There’s also a fascination with how beautiful human beings are, and not just Daria Werbowy. I think we could take an incredible picture of literally everybody. What is exciting for us is finding that one particular thing in someone that we find the most exciting and then heightening that and bringing that all out into the foreground.
Your portraits really do make people look amazing. Glenn O’Brien in his foreword says that the portrait you took of him makes him look like a hero. Did you always have a natural facility for finding that one thing?
IVL: Yeah, it comes naturally. The moment the person walks in, you know it. You see right away what is in there and what it is for us that makes that person incredible. And then it’s about heightening it through body language, through hair and makeup, sometimes what the person is wearing.
VM: And also being there a hundred percent for that person.
IVL: I guess the big difference is the amount of concentration. That real intense moment of pure concentration is what makes it so beautiful and so rewarding, even more than the final result. We always imagine that it’s these arrows of energy going from everyone, like hair and makeup, everyone that’s standing there. Everyone is focused towards that one point.
I read that you don’t shoot models under the age of 18. Was that a conscious decision?
VM: Very conscious.
IVL: We saw this happen to so many models, especially with girls. They start at 14 and everyone says to them, “Wow, you’re incredible. You’re so skinny. You look like a boy.” And once that girl is 18 and her body is finished growing, all of a sudden it was like, “Oh, she’s fat.” The poor girl. She’s just growing. We felt it was unethical to support that. You get judged anyway and it’s not easy. You have to really know who you are first. And at such a tender age—between 14 and 18—you’re figuring out who you are.
But also I love seeing these girls like Malgosia who get older and just get better.
IVL: Yeah, more beautiful and more interesting. And as they grow, we grow with them. You never get bored of shooting someone that has made an interesting life for herself.
You have a really varied crew of favorites—Daria, Tasha, Guinevere, Kate Moss, among others. What do you respond to in all these different girls?
IVL: It’s all about personality. For instance, we love working with Raquel [Zimmermann] because she’s someone that doesn’t necessarily care whether she’s beautiful in a picture. She has this incredible amount of trust and she’s ready to be anything, because she’s interested in the process of creating an image.
VM: Gisele is the same.
IVL: Shalom [Harlow]. Jessica Miller. Maggie [Rizer]. All of the girls who are in there have that quality. I think that’s what it is. Once they can know themselves well enough to let it go and go for the idea of making something together. What’s exciting for us is when someone is not afraid to be someone else, and it takes character to be able to do that. Christy Turlington is another one. I could shoot her every day of my life. The same goes for Daria. We’re shooting a whole issue on her for French Vogue for February.
Can we talk a little bit about your creative relationship? How does it work? How has it changed over the 26 years?
IVL: Well, we met in school. We started out working together when Vinoodh had his own label as a designer.
VM: We really liked the process of talking about creating that image.
IVL: And finding casting. We sort of did everything together. So when Vinoodh stopped his label, we started working together on the pictures even more closely and then it just evolved. I think the moment we started working for Vogue, it changed. Before that we would do everything.
VM: The styling. The concept. The layouts.
IVL: Sometimes the hair and makeup.
VM: Every shoot would take over two months because we did everything ourselves. We even picked up the clothes ourselves in Paris at the press agent.
IVL: But then we were asked by Vogue to shoot for them and then we had to work with an editor—it was Camilla Nickerson—which was completely new for us. All of a sudden there was an editor and the clothes, it was all done for us.
VM: When we started, we said, “OK, Inez is the photographer. You can call me a stylist.” That was our first credit. But then we came to Vogue and we had to invent a new credit, so we just said “photographer.”
IVL: Then at some point I remember we had an extra camera on set that we were trying out and Vinoodh was like, “Let me just try it out.” From that moment on, he started shooting as well. All of a sudden it was like, wow. Also the level of stress reduced greatly. Between the two of us, we knew the picture was there. It’s great. We look at each other’s [cameras] and we can say, “Oh, that’s better. Let’s go in that direction.”
Can you tell when you’re looking at the images which one is your own?
IVL: Yeah.
Can other people?
IVL: No.
VM: But sometimes we don’t even know ourselves. Especially when we shoot on location, and we move a little bit more around.
Do you disagree while you’re working?
IVL: Yeah.
What is it usually about?
IVL: It’s hard to tell. It’s little things but then we…
VM: But it’s all about the end result.
