INEZ VAN LAMSWEERDE & VINOODH MATADIN

Inez van Lamsweerde (born September 25, 1963, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) & Vinoodh Matadin (born September 29, 1961, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) are a Dutch fashion photographer duo, well known for their work for fashion magazines, advertising campaigns, and for their independent art work.

Vinoodh Matadin studied fashion design in Amsterdam between 1981 and 1985, and started working after finishing his studies. When he met Inez van Lamsweerde in 1986, she was an art student at Gerrit Rietveld Academie (between 1985 and 1990), and the two became partners both professionally and in private. In their collaborations they moved between art and fashion, and rather than making comments on fashion from an outside point of view, they’ve instead become a part of the system. Still, they’re best known for images that can be interpreted as both critical and slightly disturbing. Matadin & van Lamsweerde introduced digitally manipulated photographs at an early stage, allowing them to explore questions about gender and sexuality, reality, superficiality, and identity.

Inez spent a year on a studio grant at the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York 1992 - 1993, where she produced two series of photos that led to her breakthrough; Final Fantasy, a mix between adult features and adolescent bodies, inspired by the hype surrounding skinny supermodel Kate Moss, questioning the child as the symbol of innocence; and Thank You Thighmaster, merging life size doll-women with human models; creating a sophisticated interplay between glamour and horror. In 1995, van Lamsweerde made the more subtle manipulated series The Forest, of men with feminine body parts.
Matadin & van Lamsweerde continued to explore the boundaries of reality, placing stock photo behind the models, creating a gap between the "real" models and the obviously faked backgrounds, such as in Go Cindy, Go Cindy from 1995.
In 1997 they collaborated for the first time with the French art and design duo M/M Paris, in a campaign for Yohji Yamamoto, which has become an icon in the history of fashion photography. The collaboration has continued since, and has resulted in works such as milneufseptantesix, campaigns for Balenciaga, and the video for artist Björk's Hidden Place.
The digital manipulations of their work became more subtle as they developed their personal artistic language, and presently the only manipulations made are regular retouching.

Matadin's and van Lamsweerde's work have been published in magazines like French, British, Japanese, Italian, and American Vogue, as well as V Magazine, W Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, GQ, Self Service, Exit Magazine, Purple Fashion, Visionaire, Fantastic Man, Butt, VMAN, Arena Homme Plus, and 032c.
They have produced photographs for advertising campaigns of Viktor & Rolf, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Chloé, Stella McCartney, Valentino, Gucci, Givenchy, Roberto Cavalli, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Gap, Cesare Paciotti, Narciso Rodriguez, Pucci, Emanuel Ungaro, Balmain, Isabel Marant, Callaghan, H&M, Lee Cooper, Gloria Vanderbilt, Joop Jeans, and Roberto Coin. (wikipedia)

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