Can a photograph hold love? It is a question that has quietly accompanied the work of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for four decades, and one that now gives shape to “Can Love Be a Photograph – 40 Years of Inez & Vinoodh”, on view at Kunstmuseum Den Haag until September 6, 2026. Rather than offering a conventional retrospective, the exhibition unfolds as an intimate portrait of two artists whose creative partnership has always been inseparable from their shared life.
Spanning eighteen galleries, the exhibition brings together photography, fashion imagery, portraiture and conceptual works produced over the last forty years. Instead of following a chronological timeline, the presentation is organised through recurring ideas and visual correspondences, allowing works created decades apart to speak to one another. The result reflects the way Inez and Vinoodh have always worked: crossing effortlessly between art and fashion while refusing to recognise a meaningful boundary between the two.
Since meeting in the mid-1980s, the Dutch duo have developed one of contemporary photography’s most distinctive visual languages. Their images occupy a space where elegance meets unease, where beauty is constantly interrupted by subtle distortions and emotional ambiguity. Among the earliest photographers to embrace digital manipulation as a creative tool, they never used technology to pursue perfection. Instead, it became a way of questioning identity, desire, memory and the unstable relationship between the body and the image.
This dialogue between commercial photography and artistic inquiry has defined their career. Editorials created for publications including Vogue, Visionaire and The New York Times Magazine, together with campaigns for houses such as Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton, exist alongside museum works without hierarchy. Fashion, in their hands, becomes another medium for exploring intimacy, transformation and perception.
The exhibition opens with “Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately)” (1999), introducing the motif that quietly threads through the entire retrospective: the kiss. Far from functioning as a romantic cliché, it becomes a visual metaphor for emotional closeness, vulnerability and the gradual dissolution of individual identity. In the image, Vinoodh has been digitally erased, leaving Inez suspended in an embrace with an invisible presence. The absence is as tangible as the body itself. This exploration continues in “Me Kissing Vinoodh (Eternally)” (2010), where colour, anatomy and intimacy merge into an unsettling meditation on devotion, fragility and physical connection.
Another key section, “The Psychomorphic Phenomenon”, revisits several of the duo’s early 1990s series that anticipated many of today’s conversations around digital identity. Works such as “Final Fantasy”, “Thank You Thighmaster” and “The Forest” manipulate faces, bodies and gender codes with remarkable restraint, revealing how easily familiar appearances can become psychologically unfamiliar. Long before artificial realities entered everyday culture, these photographs questioned how technology might reshape not only images but also our understanding of selfhood.
Portraiture occupies another important chapter of the exhibition. Monumental images of figures including Prince and Kate Moss stand alongside expansive presentations of magazine spreads, editorial projects and fashion campaigns, revealing the collaborative ecosystem behind every photograph. Interwoven with these human subjects are still-life studies of flowers captured in different moments of bloom and decline. Treated with the same emotional attention as portraits, they become quiet reflections on time, transformation and the fragile cycles shared by nature and human existence.
Ultimately, “Can Love Be a Photograph” is less concerned with documenting forty years of artistic production than with revealing the emotional continuity that connects it. Across fashion, portraiture and conceptual practice, Inez and Vinoodh have remained committed to photography as a way of looking closely, preserving intimacy and embracing complexity. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience that vision in its full breadth, where every image becomes not simply a record of a moment, but an enduring gesture of attention, memory and love.
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Photos by Gerrit Schreurs
