Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam is currently featuring “Pretty Much Everything”, a celebratory retrospective titled after the two volume monograph of  Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. The work covers the past 25 years from the lenses of the Dutch duo, their collaborations with M/M Paris, fashion campaigns and personal portraits. This further spurs my interest in their success as a working couple, a chemistry exuded through their photographs and most hauntingly when they turn the camera on themselves. In 2008, Fantastic Man published a wonderful interview with Mr. Matadin by Olivier Zahm where he spoke about the duos process. Because of the nature of interviewing half of a couple, there is so much praise and almost a submission of his talent to his claim of Inez’s creative leadership, although I believe that a correlating interview would carry the same messages. As a compliment to the press release and images which Foam has kindly passed along to me, there are a few excerpts from the interview below. “Pretty Much Everything” is running from 25 June- 15 September, 2010. Curated by Marcel Feil. Exhibition design by M/M Paris. Locals and travelers please go see it!

On the beginnings of their work and development:
“OZ: Your idea was to develop work that had both an artistic side and a commercial side?
VM: Yes, we always said to ourselves that our pictures should be in magazines and also in galleries. We were young and we had very strong opinions, and in a way we were also quite cynical. Which I think is good. We thought we knew everything. I think at first people really had a hard time understanding what we were doing. They thought we were making a parody of fashion. But we loved fashion yet we also wanted to be critical.
OZ: I think your work has a parody side to it, but also a dark side. Something that you don’t understand immediately. It’s funny how you started experimenting with digital possibilities and then later you went into more classical photography.
VM: It was a logical first step for us to do everything on computer and then manipulate everything. But at some point you see that people are following you, doing the same thing and making it worse- over-retouching and making it really bad. So you get the impulse, “Let’s destroy what we’re doing.” We started making rough collages on the computer. Putting a horse face where it doesn’t belong, on top of the image. Or leaving part of the image as a rough cut out. Not making everything perfect and over-retouched because we didnt think that was really interesting. After that we moved to classical photography because it’s so iconic and direct.
OZ: And beautiful.” page. 92