It’s hard to imagine what the past several decades of fashion would have looked like without the lenses of Inez & Vinoodh there to capture it all. Since the early 1990s, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin have stood at the forefront of photography’s digital awakening. As digital cameras entered the mainstream and the internet was still taking shape, the Dutch duo carved out their own visual language—pushing the boundaries of what a photograph could look like and what it could demand of its viewer. Through uncanny image manipulation and a fearless engagement with technology, their work mirrored the cultural moment in which it was made.

Now, with forty years of being in the photography game (and perhaps even helping define it), the duo are bringing it all back home to the Netherlands with a dedicated retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Can Love Be A Photograph. Throughout 18 galleries, the museum offers viewers an expansive look at their relationship as both partners in life and in art since 1986. “A year ago, we watched a beautiful documentary about the life of singer-songwriter Roberta Flack,” says van Lamsweerde when speaking about the title of the exhibition.” In it, she wonders, ‘Can love be a song?’ I [turned] to Vinoodh [and said], ‘Can love be a photograph?’

Seen extensively throughout their work, love surfaces not as sentimentality but as structure. They have a shared love for fashion (expressed throughout the several campaign imagery completed for fashion houses such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton), love for music (with nearly every major pop star ranging from Lady Gaga to Prince sitting for a portrait by the two, documented extensively throughout V’s own editorial history), and love for human connection (with “The Kiss” serving as a recurring motif that is seen from their various Me Kissing… self portraits). In answering their own question, Inez & Vinoodh reveal that love, like photography, is not just something to be seen—but something to be felt, shaped, and remembered.

Discover moments from V’s archive through the lens of Inez & Vinoodh, spanning the last twenty-five years of V Magazine