Foam-ing at the mouth: Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin

One of the things I love about Amsterdam is the Museum Card, the purchase of which makes most of the city's museums accessible and affordable for a whole year for the culture-hungry gal on a budget. Since I'm only here for a month, I borrowed a friend's card and yesterday decided to pop into Foam, the Fotographiemuseum Amsterdam. I've always loved the space, and the exhibits are reliably bold and provocative. Currently, they're showing "Pretty Much Everything" -- a collection ranging from 1985-2010 by the famous duo Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.

They've done a lot of fashion photography, celebrity portraits, digital image alterations, collage work, and many beautiful nudes. They were the first to shoot the models and the backgrounds seperately and then subsequently superimpose the images digitally. Which, of course, was resisted at first but is now how so many things are done today.

In this show, they try to represent their lives as artists, their brains, their work that explores identity and desire on every level. Some of the images are rich in their simplicity, illuminating the natural beauty of the subjects, while some are distorted and manipulated, jarring to the point where you hate to look at it but you can't tear your eyes away. I loved it. Below are some of the many memorable images I feasted on yesterday afternoon.

If you're in Amsterdam before September 15th, be sure to stop by the museum, and definitely keep an eye out for the work of these two.