Inez & Vinoodh: Can Love Be a Photograph?
There are exhibitions you visit, and then there are exhibitions you feel. At Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Can Love Be a Photograph is less a retrospective and more an emotional landscape. It traces forty years of work by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, but instead of a timeline, you move through ideas: love, identity, beauty, illusion.
From the very beginning, Inez & Vinoodh have blurred the line between reality and imagination. As pioneers of digital image-making, they created a visual language where the familiar turns slightly unsettling, and where perfection always comes with a question mark. Their work for houses like Dior, Gucci and Chanel reflects that same tension: glossy, seductive, yet deeply psychological.
At the heart of the exhibition lies The Psychomorphic Phenomenon, a series that still feels eerily relevant. Created in the early ’90s, it explores how our desire for perfection, youth and power reshapes who we are, long before filters and algorithms took over.
And then there is the kiss. A recurring symbol in their work, it represents more than intimacy, it’s about merging identities, about the moment where self and other dissolve. Love, in their world, is not soft. It’s consuming. Transformative. Sometimes even unsettling.
Moving through the rooms, you encounter monumental portraits of icons like Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Bille Eillish, and Björk presented almost like modern-day deities. Nearby, flowers are elevated to the same status, quietly echoing themes of growth, fragility and energy.
What makes this exhibition linger is its central question:
Can an image capture love, or only the illusion of it?
Inez & Vinoodh don’t answer. They let you feel it.
Visit the exhibition at KUNSTMUSEUM