Inez van Lamsweerde on industry sexism, the metaverse, and her mission to eliminate waste via cash-giving platform Double Dutch.
When I call Inez van Lamsweerde over Zoom in early February, she’s sitting in her New York home office surrounded by photography books with the family dog close by. After the mandatory “Can you hear me? How about now?”—apparently even years of manipulating photography equipment and digital technology can’t prepare you for a life of Zoom calls—van Lamsweerde launches into an apology: “We had a very hectic two weeks. I’m sorry!” she says. (Our interview was supposed to be held a week prior but was postponed because she was needed on a last-minute call with Paris.)
For such an in-demand industry titan and household name (in the fashion and art industries, anyway), van Lamsweerde is down-to-earth. Following a lonely and isolated start in New York after moving to the U.S. from the Netherlands, she and Vinoodh Matadin (her husband and photography partner of over three decades) skyrocketed to fame in the ’90s with their avant-garde fashion photography. Fast-forward 30-plus years, and the pair are amongst the highest-paid photographers in the world, having shot every A-lister under the sun for every glossy worth its salt, as well as numerous campaigns for brands like Gucci, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and most recently, Chanel’s FW22 campaign. In addition to their fashion arsenal is a plethora of archetypal music videos for Bjork, Lady Gaga, and Kanye West, and their markedly separate art pieces and self-portraiture, which they’ve exhibited in myriad books and art galleries internationally.
The partners’ latest project, however, occupies another realm entirely. In spite of the climate crisis, present-giving remains an almost obligatory social nicety in the West. The waste that it propagates infuriates van Lamsweerde. Born of this concern was van Lamsweerde and Matadin’s newest brainchild, Double Dutch, a money-gifting platform that exists at the nexus of art and philanthropy. “We said, ‘How about there’s an app for everyone where you can kind of crowdfund your life? Because in the end, people need money. People don’t need more stuff. And all the waste that comes with gifting! [The stuff] that people don’t want to return ends up in the landfill.”
Despite the idea seeming like a no-brainer, when van Lamsweerde and Matadin approached potential investors, they were hesitant, voicing concerns that gifting money wasn’t the socially acceptable thing to do. As a compromise, van Lamsweerde and Matadin “put the idea of peer-to-peer giving on the back burner” and opted instead to focus on charitable giving. As of now, Double Dutch works as follows: You go onto the candy-pink website, select one of the hundreds of digital cards emblazoned with art (their 50-plus artist roster includes up-and-coming artists alongside famous names like Langley Fox and Marilyn Minter, as well as pieces by Gigi Hadid and Kaia Gerber, for celebrity clout), select a charity from the drop-down box along with your donation amount, and send it to whomever you wish. Amid the crisis in Ukraine, Double Dutch added a Ukrainian flag emblazoned with the words “peace, freedom” to their collection and promised to match all sales and donations from the card for Care.org’s Ukraine crisis response.
Van Lamsweerde insists that she and Matadin utilize the platform as much as they promote it. The couple, who have been married 23 years, have made a habit of communicating via Double Dutch: “Vinoodh and I send each other Double Dutch cards daily. Just to say, ‘Oh, I love you’ or ‘Lunch is ready.’ And each time we do it, we donate $20 or whatever it is to one of our charities. We use it for texting, basically.”
When van Lamsweerde was cutting her teeth as a junior photographer in the Netherlands (before teaming up with Matadin), she was no stranger to industry sexism—a sadly unsurprising reality given the few prolific female photographers in the photography world. “When I was just starting out as a photographer, when it was just me, people would look at me like, ‘Really? You know how to set up all of this equipment and put the lights up?’ Of course, it’s no longer that way,” she assures me. She needn’t tell me—van Lamsweerde is known as an all-business institution, perhaps even more so than her husband. I ask her if, with the media industry rallying together to embrace diversity, she’s noticed a shift in the number of female photographers coming up the ranks. “Hmm,” she mutters, pensive. “I want to say yes, but I don’t,” she finally answers. “It would be nice to be able to say yes.” Although she sees the value in diversifying the industry, van Lamsweerde is wary of hiring on account of identity politics. “I think what is amazing is that people are looking at a more diverse group of people to work with. I feel like that’s really good. But at the same time, I feel like talent is talent, whether you are male or female, whatever gender, whatever race—when you’re good, you’re good.”
Perhaps due to the skewed ratio of male to female photographers, fashion photography has long been guilty of both sexualizing women and perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards. In 2017, around International Women’s Day, a Saint Laurent campaign shot by van Lamsweerde and Matadin came under fire, with French advertising watchdog Autorité de Régulation Professionnelle de la Publicité demanding it be changed due to its sexist portrayal of women.
For van Lamsweerde, recognizing and unlearning the male gaze takes constant work. “It has always been and still is very difficult to make images that eroticize equality… Since the ’90s, we’ve all been working toward finding ways to talk about beauty and seduction and desire and all that, but on an equal level, and not just from a male point of view. I know for myself I am constantly questioning, ‘Is this because I’m conditioned to think that this is desirable or sexy because men say so, or is this truly what I think?’ And it’s a very difficult question. It’s something that’s absorbed in you through years and years.” The partners recently shot Channing Tatum for the cover of VMan magazine. Posing by the pool, muscles flexed in a pair of Speedos, he appears as overtly sexualized as the average female sex symbol would be—a promising step in their mission to eroticize equality.
Van Lamsweerde’s concerns surrounding the sexualization of women in photography extend to her take on the metaverse. Although the photographer is excited by what NFTs and the blockchain have to offer and sees a day when Double Dutch will expand into the NFT market, she can’t help but worry about the impossible beauty standards it may propagate. When she thinks of the metaverse, she imagines a male gamer creating his perfect fighter woman. “I remember back in the ’90s my husband and I were talking about the future, and we kept on saying to each other, ‘I bet you that people who design video games are going to be the ones designing what our future looks like, what our world is going to look like.’ We were really fascinated by that, and it is happening. The gamers are winning in terms of deciding what things look like. Even when you look at the women that today are seen as these sex symbols, people like Megan Fox—for a new generation of young men, she is the ultimate woman, their dream girl. Why? Because she looks exactly like most of the avatars—the very exaggerated features, the very exaggerated body shape, the body shape that is now revered by everyone. It comes from a man’s mind, from the guy who made these video games in which you can choose to be this woman or fight this woman, and I think that is where this new beauty standard came from. A very unrealistic drawing of the ideal fighter girl. It influenced an entire generation as to what a beautiful, strong woman is.”
Having gotten their start in photography in the late ’80s, van Lamsweerde and Matadin have witnessed seismic industry change, both practical and ideological. Most notably, the shift from analog to digital photography proffered a new world for the budding duo. “It just changed everything for us… It actually helped us become more creative because you would see what you were doing right away,” says van Lamsweerde. “So sometimes you would make a mistake, and that was great, and something you may not have come up with, and everyone would see it and love it.”
Van Lamsweerde goes on to cite the more recent, less propitious industry shift Instagram has propagated, voicing specific concern about the double-edged sword it’s become when it comes to emerging artists. “Because of Instagram, everyone’s a photographer now, which is amazing,” she says. “People communicate through images, which is incredible, and which is why Double Dutch works [van Lamsweerde found Double Dutch’s “house artist,” Leah Tinari, who has a “wicked sense of humor,” on Instagram]. But at the same time, I feel that for a young photographer, there is very little room and time to actually develop your style and your vision without the immediate pressure of a job, of [wondering] how many people are seeing it, commenting on it, and criticizing it. I feel that the nurturing of young talent is being diminished at the same time young talent gets seen more… There is no real underground anymore. Everything is out there.”
With COVID-19 inciting us to re-evaluate life’s necessities and tune out white noise (white noise being, in this case, unnecessary gifting), van Lamsweerde and Matadin believe now’s the time for Double Dutch to pivot to “peer-to-peer cash giving” and have started reapproaching investors. “It’s almost like we see it as a new form of money, the way money can look—it doesn’t look like a $1 bill; it can look like a cool card with a piece of art and have a value on it.” However, the pair aren’t planning on abandoning Double Dutch’s philanthropic baseline any time soon. At present, they’re in talks about integrating Double Dutch with the Global Goals initiative, an educational app by Samsung and the U.N.
On a broader note, looking back at a long-spanning, lucrative, and sonorous career, the couple is simply grateful to be able to give back. “We’ve been working in the fashion world for about 30 years,” says van Lamsweerde. “It’s extremely wonderful for us to finally be able to leverage our network for a good cause.”
Images courtesy of: Inez and Vinoodh
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