Interview
In conversation with Maria Bodil
Where are you both from, and how did you each find your way into visual art and photography?
We both come from creative families. We actually know each other because our parents were friends, so we have been seeing each other since we were very young. We both grew up in small villages in Brabant, and in that environment we often felt a bit out of place. That naturally made us gravitate towards each other.
When we both turned eighteen, we were very excited to move to a bigger city. At first, we both went to university, but after a while we realised we wanted to do something more creative. Neither of us studied photography in a formal way, but we both followed studies connected to image-making, concept development and visual thinking.
We were both naturally drawn to anything that had to do with images. Separately, we started experimenting with small shoots, and we would often help each other. We graduated during Covid, when there was hardly any work to be found, so we decided to give ourselves a shared name and fully go for it together.
Did you have formal training, or was it more self-taught and does that still shape how you work today?
We both have a conceptual background. Marthe studied fashion, and Lieve studied advertising. So we definitely learned how to think conceptually and how to build ideas, but the actual craft of photography is something we taught ourselves.
We learned by doing: moving lights around again and again, organising shoots, trying things out and slowly getting better. Working as a duo really helped us in that process. In the beginning, when we did not have much experience yet, being together gave us the confidence to take on quite ambitious productions. We had a bit of a Pippi Longstocking attitude: we had never done it before, so we thought we could probably do it.
How did you meet, and when did it shift from knowing each other to wanting to make work together?
As mentioned before, it happened very organically. As children, we were already doing little photoshoots together. Our parents had a big dress-up box and sewing machines, and we were always allowed to make things. Whenever our parents had dinner together, we would dress up, take photos of each other or create little fashion shows.
So creativity and expression were always part of our friendship. Later, when we had both graduated and were already helping each other with small projects, we made a very conscious decision to become a duo and really commit to working together.
How long did it take before Maria Bodil felt like a real artistic identity rather than just a collaboration?
From the very beginning, it felt like more than just a collaboration. Of course, we had both experimented with making our own work under the radar, but we started working together so early that a very important part of our artistic development happened under the name Maria Bodil.
Because of that, Maria Bodil quickly became its own identity. It was not just Marthe plus Lieve, but a shared visual language that developed between us.
What were you each making before Maria Bodil existed and how different is that from what you do now?
Before Maria Bodil, we were both experimenting with the camera. In the beginning, you are still figuring out very basic things, like how a camera works and what kind of images you are drawn to.
Lieve often photographed her friends up close, capturing vulnerable and soft moments. Marthe started capturing everyday life around her, experimenting more with abstract scenes in the street, often with a strong sense of composition and colour.
Those early ways of looking are still present in what we do now, but they have become more layered and more developed through our collaboration.
When you're in the studio together, how do you make decisions, is there a natural division of roles, or is everything genuinely shared?
We are both creatively involved in every part of the process. We do not have a fixed role division where one person is “the photographer” and the other is “the creative”. Everything is genuinely shared.
Of course, we both have our own qualities, and certain tasks often move naturally towards one of us. But creatively, we make the work together. Most of the time we agree quite easily on decisions. Sometimes there is friction, but usually that makes the work better.
When we do not agree, we have a rule that the person with the strongest intuition on that specific decision is leading. That helps us move forward without flattening the work.
You work on commissioned projects alongside your own practice. Does that ever feed back into the personal work in unexpected ways, or do you keep the two deliberately separate?
It definitely feeds into each other continuously. Sometimes, while working on a commissioned project, an idea comes up that we later want to explore further in our own work. Then we might organise a new project where we continue that idea in a different way.
One thing inspires the other. We are simply creative people, and whether something is for an advertising campaign or for an art gallery, the process in our heads is often quite similar. We believe strongly in creativity without strict categories.
In your latest series 'Body', you used photographs of your own bodies as source material, then fed them into an AI model, then brought the output back through analog printing and manipulation. Can you walk us through what that loop actually felt like, was there a moment where the images stopped feeling like yours?
The images always felt like they came from us, because it was a continuous process in which we kept feeding in our own photographs, and edits. The layering was something we directed very specifically, already feeding it into the ‘machine’, in order to get to this result. You have to guide the process quite precisely to get what you want.
Maybe the moment when the images started to feel less like ours was when they became more sexualised. That was when the interpretation of the internet became very visible. The images started to feel more erotic than the original source material actually was. Even if you feed AI only with your own images, it still carries the visual language of the internet with it.
The instructions you give an AI matter enormously, did you go in with something very specific, or did you leave it loose and see what came back?
We were very specific. We blended our own photography together, so it was less about writing prompts and more about using a system in which images are mixed with each other.
We kept feeding in new images, edits and analog printing techniques, constantly searching for something new within that process. It became a conversation between our own input and the AI. The process was very directed and based on our own material.
In some of the pieces, Body V and XI especially, the image has become very fragmented and distorted. You can really feel the collaboration there, something neither of you could have arrived at alone. Is that the kind of result you were looking for, or did it surprise you?
We were aiming for this kind of visual language. Before using AI, we were already editing the images ourselves, layering different photographs of each other in Photoshop and creating new compositions from those fragments.
The back and forth with AI created a lot of visual research. We had a very clear concept and direction, but by sending the images through the process many times, we were able to select very strictly.
And yes, sometimes the forms definitely surprised us. Because the input was already layered and fragmented, the AI sometimes misinterprets what it sees, which is why in some images body parts become something else, something unrecognisable and unrealistic. Those unexpected, impossible forms are exactly what we find interesting.
The work sits somewhere between self-portrait and something much less defined. Do you still see yourselves in these images?
Yes, elements of our bodies are still visible, but because of all the editing and the back and forth, we also feel a distance from our own bodies.
The images are not a direct snapshot anymore. Through the editing process and the influence of the internet, they are no longer fully our bodies. They are also shaped by the millions of images that exist online. Sometimes AI takes an average between, for example, a leg and a hip, and creates forms that could not really exist.
There's a long history of the female body being defined and represented by others. Does working with AI feel like a continuation of that, or something different?
Yes, in a way we feel that AI reveals where certain stereotypes around the female body exist. When you feed in an image of a woman, you often get something back that is similar, but more eroticised.
So this work becomes a self-portrait of ourselves, of each other, but also of the thousands of naked female bodies that exist on the internet. It shows how the female body is not only personal, but also shaped by all the images and expectations around it.
When you look at the finished work, what do you see, your bodies, or something else entirely?
We now really see the works as finished pieces. After looking at them so many times, thinking about form, colour, composition, layering and paper, they no longer feel like our own bodies in a direct way.
We see the full process that led to the final work. The body is still the starting point, but what we see now is the image that came out of that process.
