When I first met Inez and Vinoodh over 15 years ago, I was struck by their presence. They are at once very profound, yet peaceful. You feel that they may have once had contradictions, tensions, with and against the world, but they have now been overcome. I was struck by how attentive and precise they were. Inez in her own metaphysical way, as if she had flown through the air and landed with us, right here, right now; and Vinoodh’s mischievous smile immediately struck me, as did his way of looking at things. Both in contradiction and in the understanding of what is. I loved how free they were, even though they were at the heart of commercial culture, working for decades in collaboration with some of the largest brands there were and had ever been, and photographing some of the most famous pop figures of our time.

When I met them, I was already close to Mathias Augustyniak and Michaël Amzalag of M/M (Paris), the art direction duo with whom they had developed many now-legendary collaborations. This shared friendship meant Inez and Vinoodh welcomed me as one of their own. Now that I come to look at it, they all share quite a bit. They came of age in the 1990s, thus their work is rooted in independent culture and radical art. They do not come from commerce or from any form of industry, and performance has played a key role in their work, as well as so-called ‘relational aesthetics’. In their view, there is no singular format. Art can be expanded. Their work does not limit itself to a mere ‘art versus fashion’ discussion, for they have developed strategies to engage with both of these very different spheres of creativity, both separately and together. They know what they are doing when working for someone, yet their work is always uniquely theirs. An Inez and Vinoodh picture, whether produced for a campaign, for themselves or for an exhibition, always carries with it something uncanny. Nothing is ever a given, and everything is an opportunity to change our perception of the world.

Differently from Mathias and Michaël, however, Inez and Vinoodh are a couple not just in art, but in life. Everything they do is therefore tinted by their love towards each other and towards the people that find their way into their work. Love can take many forms. It is a force of attraction towards someone, looking to that person as an ideal of the physical world. A year ago, I published a book entitled Un Autoportrait, with its cover created by M/M (Paris). It manifests the same outlook on life as Inez and Vinoodh: I did not write ‘I’ in it once, yet it is a mapping of my life through the figures who made me. So when System’s creative director Thomas Lenthal told me Inez and Vinoodh wanted me to interview them – on the topic of self-portraiture in their work – I immediately jumped at the occasion.

Donatien Grau: One of the things that strikes me about you is that you break the mold of ‘oneness’ as a couple, both in life and in your art.
Inez van Lamsweerde: For us as a couple, but also as photographers, there is a lot of fluidity. We feel we are one and at the same time multiple – it is not so defined. This is the root of how we’ve been able to work together, live together – and have a child together – for 40 years now. We do not really see a separation, it’s more a fluid mass that moves constantly between us.
Vinoodh Matadin: I also think the world has become so complex that it’s now reached a point where you can’t always do it alone. You need multiple people. The other great thing about being two is that you can pause things. You can say, ‘Let me think about it. I will come back to you, but I have to discuss it with my partner.’ When you’re alone, you don’t have that excuse. Nowadays, it may be crucial to be quiet and not say anything. Just listen, think about it, and then come back.

I’m thinking about an early photograph of yours, with the two of you getting together and manifesting your love. You both had your separate creative lives, and then you got together.
Inez: At this point in time we have been together longer than we have been separate because we started working together so young. There’s almost no recollection of the time before we started working together. That time was just like a little episode in our life. It’s so deep and constant, and it’s now so innately who we are, that we can turn it into a performance and into an image.
Vinoodh: It started with us, but then it transformed to other, multiple people. We are the starting point for that idea.
Inez: The title of our forthcoming retrospective exhibition at Kunstmuseum The Hague, which opens in March next year, is Can Love Be a Photograph? It refers to this idea that we try to hold on to everybody we photograph. There is this need to collect people, and I think that’s the act of photographing someone. Seeing someone, letting go of your ego and flowing towards the other person. That moment comes through the lens and becomes a photograph. As we have been constructing this exhibition containing 40 years of our work, we understand that it is all about everyone around us that we’re trying to hold on to. Simultaneously, it reinforces the idea that every picture we take is essentially a self-portrait. We project ourselves onto the other. The image that comes back is a self-portrait by means of other people’s features and bodies.

You describe the world around you as a reality. Yet you rework your images quite a bit – you’re by no means realist photographers.
Vinoodh: That’s a good point. What is reality? For me, reality is always personal. For every person in the world, it’s always personal, it’s different. We have a collective idea of what is real and what is not real, but ultimately it’s very limited to each individual and we are now able to subvert the idea of a collective outward reality. We can show an intense internal state manifested in physical form by using digital manipulation.
Inez: That is the sheer luxury of cutting through the ‘decisive moment’. After we’ve taken a picture, to then go in and digitally alter things, play with the idea of time and ignore this old concept that a photo is a vision of reality, while the notion of reality has become so challenging. Digital interventions are able to cut through, heighten things in people, accentuate things, elongate things, change things around in order to visualise exactly what we’re trying to say about this person, this moment or this idea. I feel our privilege as photographers to use digital manipulation is the same as that of a painter who uses paint or a sculptor who uses raw material. When we started that was a big thing, and people questioned the fact that we would actually alter a photograph which was supposed to be a reliable reflection of reality. Now the discussion seems obsolete.
Vinoodh: What’s more, the viewer never knows exactly what we did, they have to guess. Sometimes they guess completely right and sometimes it’s completely off. They tell us, ‘Oh, you changed the hands.’ No, we did not. I like the fact that David Hockney talks about his Photoshop [iPad] works as ‘photographic drawings’. They are not just a painting nor just a photograph, they are another form of reality.

When you change the initial image to become your photograph, does it reflect your reality?
Vinoodh: Yes, it becomes that. I think the works that really succeed are not easy to be pinned down: they could have been made 30 years ago, or today. When you look at the self-portrait we did for the cover of this issue of System, you could think we changed God knows what and yet, we didn’t change anything. The lighting, the proportions, everything is natural. We just added a little ladybug on one of the flowers.

This new self-portrait references Picasso’s La Vie (1903) and Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1966), doesn’t it?
Inez: With this new work, the dark silhouette of our son Charles guards our artistic life, love and legacy and is the passage through to the world of his generation of artists. Instead of the inward-looking perspective of artists in our generation, the younger generation is looking outward. They are concerned with the world and their influence on it and feel a deep sense of need to find new ways of being a part of and working with nature. Is he planting or offering flowers? Is the hand gesture a blessing with a heart of light landing on it like a butterfly? Is his other arm hurling him towards a new world while protecting us from it? This is now not a portrait of our child, it is a self-portrait of hope for the future. His eyes are on us. We rarely choose the picture with the averted eyes. Awareness is always there, it might make our works less accessible, more confrontational – a harder sell. But we cannot deny the relentless magnificence of eye contact. 

When you think of the self-portrait, do you think of one artist making a portrait of themself?
Vinoodh: It’s a portrait of two as one. We have been working and living together for so long that our brains are in sync. It sounds a bit silly, but it’s true. We literally think the same most of the time. It is already present in our early work, but it reflects the current discussion that, in the digital world, gender will disappear. In today’s world, you can be anything you like: female, male, anything. It doesn’t matter, since you assume a persona online and true physical contact doesn’t exist. We avoid defining this separation, and talk rather about dissolving into each other. It’s more like a dance. It’s not male-female, or two artists and their egos.
Inez: We always say that when we take a picture, we eliminate ourselves as much as possible in order to get a pure version of the person through the lens. It’s really a way of covering that up. When we take people’s pictures, they often say ‘Oh, I feel so good. I wish I could hold on to this moment’ because of the attention that they’re getting. It’s such a concentrated moment. Most portraits, as you know, are done in 15 minutes. But it’s a very intense 15 minutes of pure concentration on the sitter that becomes a hypnotising experience for them. It’s this idea of truly seeing the other person. The finished work, in our minds, hopefully shows them as the most heroic version of themselves.

In an image from your early series [Me Kissing Vinoodh (Lovingly), 1999], the separation between masculine and feminine is arguably still visible. Your womanly side is quite visible, Inez, and you, Vinoodh, are fully dressed in red. It’s almost an image from a movie.
Inez: Red is the colour of blood – of life, of death, of everything at once. This image shows the cycle of life that we feel circulates in-between us, there in the negative space. In the third portrait [Me Kissing Vinoodh (Eternally), 2010], Vinoodh is wearing a black jacket and my body is painted as if my skin’s been ripped off. It is so much about being vulnerable when you love someone, with all the layers of protection gone. In the red, there is the vibrancy of flesh, body, everything’s alive, and yet we’re looking underneath it. One is about being deeply involved with someone and the other about how one can be destroyed by it.

The way you describe it is very symbolic. The very illusion that painting was a mere depiction of reality was challenged from the beginning, but it seems you’re contradicting this and producing something with much more narrative.
Inez: Even if we don’t intend it at the outset, it still creeps in. We’re noticing it now, as we’re putting this new exhibition together. We are curating this show with the museum thematically. We are happily being forced to look at our work in such a divided way, to look for the symbols and overarching ideas that are there, even though most of the time that wasn’t the original plan on set. We’re noticing elements in each photograph that symbolise certain things and keep coming back, whether it’s just a hand gesture or a lot more, somehow it doesn’t seem to be able to escape us.
Vinoodh: When we started, we were outsiders and we embraced it. We said, ‘Maybe the best thing is to stay independent, not fit in,’ which also gives us a more honest opportunity to be a viewer and observer because we’re not really within it. You just feel how the world is, and this is your commentary. Whether it has to do with what kind of shoes this person is wearing in the photograph, or what face they’re making.

You talk about commentary, but in your case, reality is heightened. How do you balance commentary and fantasy?
Vinoodh: It’s never such a conscious thing. It happens. We plan a shoot in order to let go and improvise. Even when we do a project with somebody, we think about it, and then the moment the person comes in, we might see something else. There is always room to play. Somebody said, you should plan everything 80%, so you have 20% to improvise, to breathe and be flexible.

Can you tell me about what the encounter means to you? Encountering people, encountering yourselves, and how important that word is, if at all?
Vinoodh: It is important, because it’s always a discovery. Discovering a new person and seeing how they are and how they react. It’s always a two-way street. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a commission, whether it’s a fashion photograph, or whether it’s a portrait. It’s not about conquering the other person or stealing their image. We give something and we get something back, and I think within one or two minutes of encountering the person, when it’s someone we haven’t met before, we know exactly what the image should be. It’s like being in tune and picking up on certain elements that float around the person. It’s not so much whatever they’re saying but about meeting them intently. What’s been so addictive for us is this constant encounter of new amazing people, interesting humans – even difficult people.
Inez: It also has to do with our identity as photographers. If someone says to us, ‘Oh, tomorrow you’re photographing Dua Lipa.’ Imagine we have never met her, and then they ask: ‘Do you want to come and see her in concert tonight, then meet her backstage, and tomorrow do the portrait?’ We would always say no, we’d say we want our subject to enter our world as our first encounter with them. We feel we are our best in our studio, our territory, our world. When someone enters our studio, steps into our realm, it’s a much purer exchange than going backstage. We treat everybody the same, famous or not, there is no difference for us. A human is a human.

You talk about the human. For me, there is a tension in your work between the human and the posthuman.
Inez: We have an endless fascination with malleability, with the possibility of reinvention, of change, of using the physical side of humans to visualise something deeper. This idea of ‘posthuman’ just breaks through the limits of our body or our face. The exciting part about making that kind of work and visualising these ideas is that there’s no border. In a photograph all we have is the surface, we try to go beneath it by digitally cutting through the surface in the most literal way.
Vinoodh: People always have an idea of who they are, but it’s always based on comparisons – to your father, your family, you’re a copy of them. Nobody knows where it came from, but people just accept that. They behave the way they do because of tradition. For them that’s reality, but they don’t have to be like that. Their life can be totally different but a lot of people never escape it. They just follow the path their ancestors started and never diverge from it. We always say: ‘You don’t own your child.’
Inez: We are interested in these blends, part-human, part-machine, something that is unnerving yet alluring. What is described in the uncanny valley theory is very attractive for us. We had this discussion recently with our son. We were talking about a certain group of artists that are in the techno music scene and the kind of imagery that they put out, which is generally a childish idea about the future: robots, half-human, half-machine – generally also with a message of re-creation. Most of the images may be very first degree or very kitsch, sort of the first thing that comes to mind. It is all based on the fact that the new generations grew up playing video games, which has become their reality. People who create video games have established aesthetics for the generation that our son is a part of. Personally, it fascinates me, because I am interested in visions of the future. And I’d like to be someone who partakes in imagery about the future or what the future could look like physically for humans. What’s been put out there is fascinating. Not always amazing, mostly kitsch, but I’m still drawn to it because I want to find exciting ways to imagine the future. We identify with the idea of transformation by presenting a world in which everything becomes a temporary construct.
Vinoodh: I try to understand where the good part is, what part says something about the future that has softness to it. I think that what I keep looking for is gentleness. You always want to ask better artists to create this future world for these games. In most people’s minds a robot is the future, whereas I’m thinking, ‘Where is the softness? What is the gentle, kind, natural part of the future?’ Instead of a robot offering you a rose or whatever. In this society, I sometimes think we should all sit down and do nothing: not speak, not have an opinion, nothing; maybe just walk in the forest.

Do you think there can be a kind part to the future? The current path to the future is more apocalyptic…
Vinoodh: Kids get trained to see that way because they play all these games, so they think it’s part of humanity, that the future is a dystopian society. Whereas I have so much hope for the world. That is the premise for this image we did, in which we are protected by our kid, symbolising this idea of hope. A kind spirit of nature, sitting still on the moss in our garden and just looking.
Inez: If everyone would wake up before sunrise and watch the sun come up, owning your day, we feel the world would be different. We are disconnected from the planet we walk on, and we have to go back to it. Now we’re just floating around in our own bubbles. Scared, thus greedy.

I want to ask you about your relation to the other arts. The relation to performance is very clear, but also to painting, to sculpture.
Inez: People often ask us, ‘What is typically Dutch about your work?’ We don’t even think about it, but it’s true that we grew up every week looking at Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Mondrian, those works that are part of Dutch heritage. It is all there in our work, and those are our earliest memories of what art is. Also, there is the idea of not being interested in reality as a given, which has to do with the malleability of a photograph in our hands through the computer, but also the malleability of a human body even in just positioning the lighting camera angle. It’s something you find in painting as well. There are certain style signifiers that you find in our pictures that you’d find in painting. People say, ‘Oh my God, here they come again with their hands!’ There’s always a hand gesture in our pictures. Some people tell us, ‘We don’t want the hands?’ Then we have to really restrain ourselves, not to give the hands the importance we normally do. This ends up being an exercise: how to ignore the hands. Then, do we still make an image that in our mind speaks to a certain kind of iconic, heroic person? We feel the gesture is such a big part of it…

You talked about being Dutch. I also think that a key factor about you is that you are a multicultural artist couple, which, in the 1990s, was quite rare. How do you feel about that?
Vinoodh: It is true that it put us in a space of foreignness at the beginning. Being together came from feeling the same. We’re like magnets to each other, we could see and feel that we were dealing with the same stuff.
Inez: That’s something we feel in the people we surround ourselves with. They’re our family, our tribe. It’s a bit like your book [Un Autoportrait], which is a self-portrait of you defined by the others you surround yourself with, but without having them be disguised as you.

While in your self-portraits, they can be disguised.
Inez: Yes, they are ours, they belong to us. I feel like we all want to be the other, don’t you? When you look at those pictures, it is Gaga as me with me, Gaga as me with Vinoodh…
Vinoodh: Gaga wanted to be Inez. Madonna got the long black wig, and said she wanted to look like Inez. Inez is such an incredible person.
Inez: There’s something about Vinoodh that is so uncompromisingly him. It is his struggle and his beauty. When we go to Holland, people there ask him, ‘Who are you? You don’t belong here.’ It is the way we have positioned ourselves in the worlds we operate in, the art world and the fashion world. We’ve positioned ourselves as outsiders, independent, in both worlds from the beginning. We move in these worlds without fully playing the game.
Vinoodh: I was always mesmerised by Inez’s presence. I met her when she was 21 and I was struck by the way she talked to people. Her opinion was important to people.
Inez: I think it’s about being convinced, right? That is what I always tell young artists: you have to be convinced of what you’re making. Otherwise, forget being an artist. It’s about being so convinced and so inspired by the thing that you’re making or want to make that you pull everyone into it, whether it’s with the image itself or during the process of making it. I definitely learned that from Lady Gaga, from Björk, from Marina Abramovic. It’s this complete belief in, and excitement about, what you’re making. No matter what headspace or level the people around you are on, you just pull them in with you.
Vinoodh: That self-belief does not mean we don’t listen to others. We pay an enormous amount of attention to other people’s input. We love the people we work with. We love working with Mathias and Michaël [of M/M (Paris)] because we feel that with our four brains, there is no limit. Teamwork is the result of all these different inputs and ideas. Everyone brings something, whether that’s the hair and make-up artists, stylists, the model…
Inez: When we’re on set, we see these arrows of energy go to that one person, which makes them grow and light up. It’s the most beautiful thing to see. That’s why, from day one, when we started to shoot digital we refused to have a screen on set. A lot of people work with the camera tethered to a screen. It results in everybody that’s part of the team sort of huddling around the screen and not looking at what’s actually happening on set and being present with the subject. The energy shifts completely and it has diminished the role of the photographer to a point where they could just be a human tripod. The artistry, the magic of what happens in the camera, has disappeared. It’s like being behind a painter’s back with all of us sitting behind him and commenting: ‘Do you think that eye is too big? Do you really want to use the red? Maybe you should use blue now, or make the head smaller.’ This way of behaving has changed the way people see, in the fashion world at least, the role of the photographer. We say, ‘No. We’re creating the magic, we are making this image,’ and that’s how you get to something more than just a registration of a person.

Have you ever felt limited working in the fashion world?
Inez: No, because we know what we’re doing, and why we’re there. We’re there to make the product look incredible so that someone else wants to buy it and in exchange we get paid. It’s a very clean set of rules that is a wonderful limitation at times. It can feel restrictive when you know it could be better but your client doesn’t think so. It’s sad sometimes, but it’s not the end of the world. We always say compromise is our friend.

Do you manage to get some uncanny into these scenarios?
Inez: We do most of the time, but I guess we’re lucky. We’ve been at it for so long now that they know what they are looking for when they come to us. They know how to use us to the best of our ability. The ideal way is when we are involved from the beginning with the designer, when we watch the collection and the show being made. It helps form our ideas about the imagery that will be made after a show, when we really think about the strategy of the brand: who is the woman that they’re trying to portray? We like treating it almost like a film script. I create the story around her and then, from there, all the images come. We had that kind of relationship with Virginie Viard at Chanel. It was a beautiful five years doing that with her for all the prêt-à-porter collections. We had it with Yohji Yamamoto, with Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga.
Vinoodh: There were some great moments in those relationships. It was the case when Calvin Klein came to us and said, ‘You have to make me relevant again. Whatever you do, make me relevant.’ He wanted to sell the company. In these moments, they know they’re going to get the best out of us.

For artists who have been working a lot with technology, like yourselves, is AI bringing with it a crisis?
Vinoodh: For me it’s like a great calculator that needs a lot of energy. It can be handy, but you don’t have to use it. It’s a tool. It’s like what kind of camera you use. If you just use it as a tool, it’s totally fine, but it’s not the end of photography. AI is great, but it also makes a lot of mistakes. It is as if we had summarised an entire world of possibilities into two letters: ‘A’ and ‘I’. It’s useful to do research, but we haven’t really used it to create things and we’re not too interested in it. We’re obsessed with the process of making our work. The idea of writing a prompt and having an image spat back at you is not appealing to us because we love being with people. We love the team, we love the exchange with the sitter in front of us, we love every aspect of the physical making. So this thing of putting in a really sophisticated prompt and receiving your final artwork is not how we want to spend our lives.

Are you still outsiders at this point?
Vinoodh: We still feel that we are observers. We still try to reinvent ourselves, and learn new things. We’re communicating through images, and if they reach the level of pop culture, great!
Inez: There is always something about the human creeping into our work. We are always looking to the future, fascinated by new solutions, and not scared for images to be ‘pop’. We’re outside, but we’re not trying to be niche. Thinking about the future influences us, but we know we’re operating in pop culture. Subverting things from within is more fascinating to us than fighting them. From day one we decided we were going to be outsiders and not commit to one side or the other. It meant that we had an opportunity to view things from different angles. Our work was shown at Matthew Marks Gallery in the ’90s, and critics said it was too fashion. And then the fashion world at that time was like, ‘Oh, this is too arty.’ Now people look at things differently and see that it all comes from one thing. We don’t necessarily try to be one thing or the other. That may be where the uncanny comes from. People ask themselves the question: ‘What am I looking at? Is this art? Is this fashion? Is this a portrait? Is this a new person?’ We just love living in dubiousness.

One last question, what’s your newest reinvention?
Vinoodh: My first answer would be to disconnect. AI will also force people to disconnect, and I’m curious about it, because there will be a new underground and a different way of living, and I think that’s important. No one talks about it, but people should focus on that. Maybe it’s good when nobody talks about it. The moment people name something, it’s over. The moment you’re on Instagram, immediately you are a star, everyone has seen it, and everyone moves on 15 minutes later. I believe very much in this idea of the unseen, unknown, undiscovered. We’re not criticising social media but I feel we all need the quiet space where things are reinvented. That’s why I am so fascinated about the other side that will come up. I think the word gentle is the word of the century to come and Inez, you are a gentle woman.