Inez Van Lamsweerde

Inez van Lamsweerde (born 25 September 1963, Amsterdam, Netherlands) and Vinoodh Matadin (born 29 September 1961, Amsterdam, Netherlands) are a Dutch fashion photographer duo, whose work has been featured in fashion magazines and advertising campaigns. They also produce independent art work.

For over 25 years, Inez and Vinoodh have worked in the field of fashion photography. Working together since 1986, the award-winning Dutch partnership has built a collection of work. They have staged exhibitions and collaborative projects, participated in international group shows and their artworks are held in private and museum collections. Inez and Vinoodh live in New York with their son, Charles Star Matadin.

Inez and Vinoodh met at the Fashion Academy Vogue in their hometown, Amsterdam, where they both initially studied fashion design—Vinoodh from 1981 to 1985 and Inez from 1983 to 1985. Inez took a master's degree in photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (1985–90) and Vinoodh founded the Lawina clothing line with his classmate Rick Bovendeert. A commission for Inez to photograph the 1986 Lawina collection led to Vinoodh beginning to work with her, first as a stylist and eventually in 1995 as co-author of the images they produce together. The Lawina label closed in 1990 when Inez graduated and the pair began practicing as artists. A year-long residency awarded to Inez by PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City from 1992 to 1993 marked the beginning of a period of experimentation with digital technology, leading to a collection of sequences about computer manipulation. Using Paintbox software to smooth out and remove the nipples and orifices of nudes, Thank You Thighmaster (1993) aimed to illustrate elegance and horror. Final Fantasy (1993) attempted to focus upon child sexuality by digitally grafting the mouths of men onto the faces of toddler children.

As Inez and Vinoodh’s notoriety burgeoned in the art world, the fashion community became equally captivated by their early editorial assignments for the style magazine BLVD in Amsterdam, where the two were now living. A breakthrough story republished as For Your Pleasure in British style magazine The Face in April 1994 added high-octane glamour to the dark and unsettling tenor of their work and marked them engaging with fashion explicitly as the subject of their work. Collaborating with Belgian designer Véronique Leroy, they formulated a visual vocabulary of slick, predatory figures, shiny surfaces and erotic poses that they set against hyperreal backdrops constructed from stock, picture library imagery. The resulting tableaux flew in the face of the prevailing taste for documentary-centered style photography, pre-empting the end of the so-called “grunge” aesthetic and earning Inez and Vinoodh all-important editorial commissions for elite fashion magazines Visionaire and Vogue together with their first advertising contracts for luxury brands Hervé Léger and Vivienne Westwood.

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