Just as their broody new Miu Miu video launched, the New York-based photography team of Inez & Vinoodh headed west this month to install their eponymous exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. The partners, Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, who are both from Amsterdam, have worked together since the late 80s, shooting for V Magazine, W Magazine, Vogue, Paris Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The Gentlewoman. They were early adopters of digital photography and are known for manipulating images into compositions that are at once elegant and extreme. A shot hanging just inside the gallery’s front door illustrates this tendency. Model Carmen Kass is depicted as a three-headed hydra of sorts. “Everything you can possibly do to an image has happened to that picture, it looks sort of satanic,” says Van Lamsweerde. Kass’s hips jut out, and her three faces are covered in masses of hair.

Beverly Hills Gagosian Gallery Director Deborah McLeod notes that the show, on view through Friday, August 23, includes “both portraits created over 10 years ago and images that are hot off the presses.” The latest additions are part of the team’s new flower series that references the tradition of Dutch still-life paintings and incorporates Van Lamsweerde’s love of ikebana. The couple bought blooms from the flower market, quickly arranged them and shot them the same day. The most conventional photograph in the series is Frozen Bouquet (2013), a reference and homage to Irving Penn’s famed still-life photographs of frozen peas.

“The theme here is the sense of duality that underlies every photograph, the push and pull between opposites,” says Van Lamsweerde. Through their images, she and Matadin question what is female or male, what is an identity and what is underneath the surface of a person or object. Van Lamsweerde explains that the two large downstairs rooms of the Beverly Hills gallery (both designed by Richard Meier) led the team to mount a show with a built-in dichotomy. The flower images are installed in the new larger gallery and the portraits hang in the cavernous front room and a smaller back nook. “Both large rooms are portraiture in our mind. We’re stripping down flowers or a person to its bare essence, the one thing that makes the subject so unbelievable,” says Van Lamsweerde.

Matadin compares shooting to meditation. Inez & Vinoodh typically spend about half an hour with a subject for a portrait and less than an hour on the flower images. “Often, the shot from the first moment is the best,” says Van Lamsweerde. “Or,” adds Matadin, “It’s the last shot, the one where you get a different expression.”

Though the couple is known for manipulating images, Matadin says they now find themselves working to keep shots from being retouched. He explains that such techniques are just one tool they use to create a photograph and notes that he and Van Lamsweerde glorify images the same way Richard Avedon elongated legs in his dark room. Still, Van Lamsweerde and Metadin have no nostalgia about film. “The next step in photography is video,” says Matadin.

By Elizabeth Varnell

 

Pictured: Michelle Williams, New York Times Magazine, 2006
Pigment Print on Watercolor Paper
40 x 33 1/2 inches (unframed)
41 x 34 1/2 inches (framed)
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Photo by © Inez & Vinoodh / Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

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