Why Dutch photographer Inez van Lamsweerde is shocking Europe.
There's something not quite right about the tiny Amsterdam flat Inez van Lamsweerde shares with her boyfriend of two years and collaborator of ten. Is this some sort of Spacecake flashback, or what? "Our friends all feel seasick here - it's the floor," she laughs. "We don't notice it because we live here." Ah - the warped floor: Its wonkiness beats up the optic nerves and leaves the consciousness demanding a re-count. Rather like her photographic work, in fact.
"I don't see fashion as most people do - as something separate, reduced to seasonal hemlines," she says. "It's always with me inside, like a language." But it was not until she left school to study fashion that she first grasped how she wanted to use this language: in photography.
Animate or inanimate, van Lamsweerde's models tend to be highly eroticized, her compositions filled with tension and friction. For the last two years she has worked with Quantel Paintbox operator Karin Spijkers to get the desired look. "Slight manipulations are really the most interesting," she says.
A strength of her work is its deliberate crossing of boundaries. Thank You Thighmaster (left), a series of life-sized doll-women, was produced by digitally grafting the face of a doll over the face of a model, then stretching the real skin back over. The rest of the body and hair is "real," except skin was redrawn over the nipples and the genitals were removed.
Final Fantasy is a challenging series of photo-graphs inspired by the hype surrounding skinny supermodel Kate Moss. "When Corrin Day photo-graphed her in underwear for English Vogue, everyone was going 'child pornography blah blah.' I decided to go a stage further and use professional agency models, age 21/2."
These terror tots (one of which is shown at right) hint at how we are becoming isolated by our technology as games and VR encroach further on our "real" reality - hence the series' title, from a Nintendo game. The artist's only digital manipulation was to give the girl the mouth of a man.
Final Fantasy questions our stereotypical views of children, and asks whether "they are somehow sacred or sacrosanct, as if the child were a symbol of innocence," says van Lamsweerde. "I wanted to ask whether we can still say kids are born innocent. In New York it was the 12- and 13-year-olds that scared me most."
