The Netherlands tend to punch above its weight in many aspects of the arts. Contemporary dance is perhaps the most significant – another is photography. Erwin Olaf is probably the best known contemporary photographer but running a close second must be Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Olaf’s current show at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam drew huge enthusiastic crowds and Can Love be a Photograph is sure to follow suit.
Inez & Vinoodh are a renaissance couple whose work embraces fashion, portraiture, installation art, video and much more besides. Both born in Amsterdam, the couple met while students there and have been a unit since 1986. Working mainly out of New York, they have contributed to major magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Interview, V etc etc. and shot campaigns for Chanel, Calvin Klein and Louis Vuitton, to mention but a few. Proof of this can be seen in the room full of printed work. They have photographed the glitterati having worked extensively with Lady Gaga and Björk and are not shy of the camera themselves.
Can Love Be a Photograph is a retrospective to celebrate forty years of collaboration – they had another major exhibition at Foam in Amsterdam in 2010 to celebrate their twenty-five years.
The work itself is difficult to categorise ranging, as it does, from fairly straightforward fashion shots to studio portraits and from videos to installations. One section I found particularly interesting was in two side room the walls of which were covered with tiny annotated Polaroid photos which were used, pre-digital photography, to preview set-ups, lighting etc. These provide a small insight into how the couple actually work.
According to Inez & Vinoodh photography’s most profound task is “not to show the world as it is, but to visualize how we are shaped – emotionally, bodily, and relationally – by the technologies through which we see and connect with one another”. This exhibition, based around sixteen themes, takes us through a forty year kaleidoscope of creative work in which the couple are often both photographer and subject. Their work is rarely what it seems, there always appears to be a hidden agenda lurking in the background, ready to jump out and bite the complacent viewer. They say the camera never lies, but truth, as we know, is subjective. With a camera, who creates the truth, is it the subject or is it the photographer?
Can Love Be a Photograph continues at Kunstmuseum in The Hague from 21st March until 6th September
