Four decades, countless icons – and still that subtle sense of unease beneath the surface. With Can Love Be a Photograph, the Kunstmuseum Den Haag presents a major retrospective of one of the most influential photography duos of our time: Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. The exhibition runs until September 6, 2026 and is accompanied by a book published by Hannibal Books.
For over 40 years, Inez & Vinoodh have been redefining the boundaries of photography. What defines their images is not style, but tension. Between fashion and art, intimacy and staging, surface and rupture. Everything feels familiar – and shifts in the very same moment. Beauty, identity, representation: nothing is fixed, everything remains in motion.
That Inez & Vinoodh were among the first to embrace digital image-making as a creative tool in the 1990s is no side note, but part of their DNA. Technology is a means – never the message.
A central motif of the exhibition is The Kiss, regarded by the artists themselves as its emblem. The kiss recurs throughout their work and represents more than a moment of intimacy: it marks the point at which two individuals merge physically and emotionally, becoming almost indistinguishable from one another.
“Viewing every image as a form of self-portraiture, Inez & Vinoodh frame the exhibition as a testament to love – understood as the act of truly seeing, valuing, and cherishing one another.” Kunstmuseum Den Haag
The publication traces the duo’s shared journey. Alongside numerous iconic works, it features contributions by Mathias Augustyniak, Guus Beumer, Francesco Bonami, Pamela Chen, Donatien Grau, Margriet Schavemaker and Willemijn van der Zwaan, as well as a conversation with Tilda Swinton. Book design by M/M (Paris).
To this day, Inez & Vinoodh collaborate with leading fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton, Chloé and Chanel, and shape editorials for publications including Vogue, Rolling Stone, W Magazine and The Gentlewoman. Their photography functions both as mirror and magnifying glass: drawing from popular culture while simultaneously questioning it. Between the familiar and a subtle sense of disruption, between the everyday and the staged, a visual language emerges that extends far beyond fashion.
At the core of both exhibition and book lies a thought that has long shaped their work: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Photography as relationship. As attention. As something that happens between people – not just in front of the camera.
“Inez & Vinoodh have been able to create something utterly fantastic; an invisible reality that looks artificial but is not. A reality that speaks of our ungraspable inner world and its relationship with our perceptions and imagination. A world in which love and passion, once they encounter each other, cannot separate any longer. Blessed and doomed at the same time. Yes.” Francesco Bonami, from ‘Inner Invisible Artificiality’, 2025
Can Love Be A Photograph- 40 Years of Inez & Vinoodh
Exhibition 21 March – 6 September 2026
Kunstmuseum Den Haag
The Netherlands
Book design by M/M (Paris)