IvL: Our apartment and office are in the same building in New York City, but on different floors. I think people are often quite surprised that we don’t live in a white loft that looks like a room in The Mercer hotel. It’s actually very warm and a bit like a group show. Everything we have in there – the art, the objects – has been selected to look as if we’ve been living there since the ’70s. When in fact it’s only looked like that for four or five years.

PM: So it’s an autobiographical interior?

VM: Yes. There’s lots of wood and stone, fur, warm colours. It’s like a mix of Swedish sauna, Japanese teahouse and ’70s Dutch interior. But we don’t get to spend a lot of time there. We’re on set maybe 150 days per year, not counting editing, prep and days in the office. Probably more.

PM: You must be incredibly fit to work that hard at such a level?

IvL: We’re very conscious of our health, yes, since we’re still travelling like crazy. With so much pressure on us to perform as soon as we arrive, and with such a large team, we have to think of ourselves as top athletes. We watch our drinking, take massages, practise yoga.

IvL: And we eat healthily.

VM: Food’s very important. We always say, “If the catering’s good on set, then the pictures will be good.”

IvL: A couple of years ago we started having this amazing chef named Jason Edwards come to our house and cook for us. To me, it’s the most luxurious thing in the universe.

VM: And the great thing is he makes it all with Charles, teaching him how to cook. They make this nutritious meal for us and when we come home, we all eat it together.

IvL: It feels so healthy and relaxed. I have to say that out of all the luxuries we have, I wouldn’t want to lose Jason.

PM: And what’s your ultimate luxury, Vinoodh?

VM: Reading a book. Being alone for an hour. I like going on a really long flight – to Bali, or India – to experience that sense of transition into holiday time. Then when you arrive it really feels like one.

IvL: We do try to take time away from work. But, it’s never really separate because, ultimately, we’re still colleagues. Other people must get to go home and assume a different personality with their husband or wife. But it’s really only when we close the studio in August and we’re just the three of us, with Charles, by the pool, that we get to rediscover that level of intimacy.

PM: I guess you spend the rest of your year creating an intimate context for other people to relax in.

IvL: Completely. Photography is so much about creating a certain atmosphere on the shoot to reach the result you want.

PM: Tell me how you start photographing someone you’ve never met.

VM: We start with Inez positioned facing the subject and me at the side so I can roam around. We shoot everything together.

IvL: And I’m usually very direct. I always say exactly what I think, usually a genuine compliment. I always notice something I love in someone’s face – or body, but mainly face – and immediately zoom in on that. Once I’ve seen it, I almost can’t hear what else is going on around me.

PM: Do you tell them what you’re doing? Would you say, “Oh, I love the shape of your nostrils”?

IvL: Sure, I’ll say, “Wow, your eyes are amazing – the way they’re sitting in their sockets...” Then the shoot opens right up, and we establish this very personal rapport.

PM: So it’s part flattery, part therapy?

VM: It’s funny, a lot of people say that they feel they’re being hypnotised by us.

IvL: A while ago, when we were shooting Josh Brolin for The New York Times Magazine, he even started to speak like me. He did the most perfect impersonation of my voice and how I talk someone into that zone of being photographed.

PM: Those Hollywood portraits are now so familiar. Do you ever get sitters trying to recreate the Clint Eastwood pose or ‘the Scarlett Johansson’?

IvL: Once, we were shooting the harpist Joanna Newsom and right away, she knew where those hands had to go. I could tell she’d looked at our work, seen my obsession with hands and thought, “Oh, okay, that’s what we’re going to do.” She was so full on. Amazing.

PM: What can you do to prepare before they arrive?

VM: If you’re shooting on location, you have to work with what happens in the moment, but in the studio you can control the result to some degree: the lighting, whether the model will be in the foreground. But from there, it’s down to us to help the model perform.

IvL: From my own experiences posing for a photographer, I’ve noticed you can feel completely lost without an intimate connection and are unable to be all fabulous. So in cases where Vinoodh and I are too overloaded to be the person that creates all the fun, there’s Marc, our studio manager. Or Stephen Galloway, our choreographer, who’s basically like this fawn that comes bounding into the studio and is a huge help to us in keeping things upbeat. It doesn’t have to be all party time and drinking. But you need this extra energy. It’s like having people over to your house and...

PM: Entertaining?

IvL: Precisely. Like welcoming guests.

VM: Then for us to get really engaged, there has to be something we’ve never done before.

IvL: When we first started shooting advertising campaigns for Chloé, we got the models running in the streets shouting, “No!” That anarchic movement just set us free. All these people gathered around them, shouting “No, no, no!”

VM: Because it creates a better facial expression than “Yes”.

IvL: Yeah, “Yes” doesn’t make your mouth look very good.

PM: How long can each photograph take?

VM: It can be quite quick. The first expressions are often the best, while the subject is still open to it. Either that, or you have to go really over the top and do it, like, 300 times. Then they’re so worn out you get another expression, like in the portrait that was used for Narciso Rodriguez’s first fra-grance. We must have shot a thousand takes of Carmen Kass to get that image.

PM: And do you always agree on what’s gorgeous and what’s just strange?

VM: Not always, thank God! Most of the time, Inez’s vision of beauty is completely different from mine.

IvL: Though we witness exactly the same scenes, Vinoodh sees things from a very different angle. When we take a quick peek in the backs of our cameras, that slight disparity between what’s been captured in each can be so surprising. It’s lucky, I guess. After all these years, we always have something to talk about.

ME: True, but we never ever imagined a discussion about it in Denmark in 2012. It was front-page news!

GJ: That’s fabulous, to make the front page.

ID: That’s the good thing about public art: it engages a wide section of the population. You reach people in a different way from how a museum or a gallery would. Our statue in Trafalgar Square, in London, has had such a huge reception. People seem to really accept it on all different levels. They feel very drawn to it and they love it.

GJ: I’m sure that the process and the challenge of getting your ideas approved and realised are as much fun for you as the actual unveiling?

ME: I think the process surely is about testing yourself. That’s why we wrote a theatre play. If you get too good at something, you start to become lazy and ignorant. You need to give yourself new challenges all the time in order to keep your energy level up. It’s always fun to disappoint your audience. If they expect one thing, it’s time to make something different. I realised that when I was ten years old – I was no longer amazed by our Christmas tree. My parents decorated and lit it in exactly the same way each year.

ID: That’s so boring.

ME: You can’t expect me to be amazed by the same thing, year in, year out. I was, like: “Burn the tree down! Make it all black, whatever. Do something else. Dare to disappoint!”

GJ: What would your dream location be for a public art piece?

ME: It’s fun to do things in deserted places. I mean, it’s fantastic that we got to do Trafalgar Square. But I got quite a kick out of the Prada store that we made in the middle of the Texan desert. There are truckers driving down Highway 90 who haven’t seen a gas station or a diner for hours and then they pass this Prada store and they’re, like: “What the hell?” They don’t think it’s art; they just think somebody’s gone completely nuts. That’s quite fun. I would love to do something somewhere in Africa.

GJ: You’ve created a special park for rejected art works in Neukirchen, Germany, which is also quite remote.

ID: It’s a project we proposed to the local Kunstverein and they’re running it for us. It’s, like, a fenced football pitch where we collect unwanted statues. Art outcasts.

GJ: Do you accept statues of Lenin?

ME: No, no Lenin statues and no garden dwarfs – only things that were made with serious artistic intentions. There’s a signboard that says: Park für unerwünschte Skulpturen.

ID: There are companies that have an abstract, modernist block where they’d rather just have a parking lot, so they’re happy to get rid of it. We just got a Vito Acconci piece that this big German company didn’t want anymore, for example.

ME: The park will look great in 20 years. It’s already starting to get quite pretty. Even though Neukirchen is off the beaten track, people are already going there especially for the park.

GJ: Where did you two meet?

ME: We met in a gay disco...

ID:...called After Dark. The hilarious thing was that when we went home together, we realised that we not only lived in the same area, in the same street, but that we lived in the same building. Michael lived one floor above me. We were meant to be together.

GJ: What did you do for a living back then?

ID: I was working as a red-nosed clown.

ME: And I wrote poetry. But there was no market to publish my work – Denmark is so small – so I was experimenting with new ways to show poetry, on monitors. That’s what I ended up showing in a gallery. Of course nobody from the liter- ary world came to see my project, but I did get asked to participate in another gallery show. When Ingar and I met we started performing together. We never knew it would be a life-long collaboration. We were just boyfriends sharing the costs.

ID: And having fun. Neither of us had had any formal art education. It was just something we invented together.

GJ: That’s amazing! Was it a difficult breakup when you split up as lovers ten years later?

ME: It was. I think we had exhausted each other because we literally did everything together: travelling, working, sharing friends. We were even the same size at the time...

ID:...so we’d share clothes and socks and underwear.

ME: Who can do that for more than ten years? It was like we’d lived through 50 years of normal marriage in ten years.

GJ: Did either of you take a break to go on a trip around the world on your own?

ID: No. We did postpone and cancel some shows, but we were lucky to have this one show at Tate Modern where the curator also happened to be going through a divorce. I think she played a big part in saving our working relationship. We would cry on her shoulder after a long working day.

GJ: Do you take inspiration from other duos?

ID: Laurel & Hardy are quite sweet.

ME: Of course we don’t dress up in identical suits, like Gilbert & George. It would be ridiculous if we’d do that too.

GJ: There’s a part in your play, Happy Days in the Art World, about the fear of what could happen to an art duo if they would split up. “If one of us dies, the other won’t be worth anything,” one of the characters says.

ID: That’s what happens to art duos. Look at what happened with General Idea. It was very hard for A.A. Bronson to continue. It has taken him 15 years to get back into doing shows on his own. We’ll see what happens to the legacy of Fischli and Weiss now that David Weiss has passed away. I do think they’re so established that their work will live on.

ME: When you collaborate for so many years, you create a third persona who is the artist and who is somewhere between the two individuals. Like, Elmgreen & Dragset is not Ingar, and it’s not Michael. It’s a third character.

GJ: A persona that doesn’t exist but that nevertheless dies when one of you passes away.

ME: It’s not even about death: it’s the same with artists who split up after years because they can’t stand each other anymore. Look at Marina Abramovic and Ulay. I think in our time we’re all so afraid of dependency. It’s all about being an individual, being free. And we’ve all become very bad citizens because of it, because we don’t want to contribute to society. When you collaborate you have to accept that you’re absolutely, utterly, totally dependent on each other. You’re in the hands of the other person: publically, privately, financially... That’s dangerous. It’s a commitment that’s not considered to be very cool these days.

LB: I’d say it’s 30 per cent talent and 70 per cent the rest. Training is a huge factor. We play live, so you really have to be in top form and know what you’re doing if you want to bring life and meaning to a performance.

SB: We practice for eight, ten hours a day. It’s like a working day. We work on Sundays too. And we’re always sitting down. It can be really bad for your back. Swimming would be good, but we don’t have the energy.

CR: Do you have someone who mentors or teaches you?

SB: I’m at the Royal College of Music in London, doing an MA, so at the moment I have a professor, Dmitri Alexeev, who is one of the world’s greatest pianists. He’s the reason I decided to go there. He’s worth having to take the Eurostar every week.

CR: How did you start playing together?

LB: It was someone else’s idea. In 2002 the director of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra asked us to play a duet. Sanja was only 14 and we played Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in front of a thousand people in Belgrade. Then in 2004 we were invited to give a recital during a festival at Laon, France.

Sanja, left, and Lidija, right, were photographed at the Conservatoire
National Supérieur in Paris

CR: Do you play on one or two pianos?

LB: We do both. You have piano four hands and piano duos.

SB: With piano four hands you play side by side on one piano, sharing the pedals, which can be quite difficult. The piano is probably the only instrument one can share – it’s impossible to share a violin or a cello.

CR: And is one of you the leader and one the follower?

LB: Yes, but it depends on the piece. There should always be one voice that leads as a melody, but it can be anywhere on the piano – high, low – and it can change during the piece. That’s what makes four hands so interesting for us – and for the audience. Four hands is the closest thing to a string quartet, with each hand corresponding to one line. The difference is that we can take much larger chords in one hand than a string player can. Often there are also two or three different lines per hand, which makes the musical discourse more complex, intriguing and exciting.

CR: So it’s not that one of you is always playing the bass and the other is always playing the melody.

LB: No, we constantly change roles. It’s also important to know and be able to play both parts.

SB: In classical repertoire such as Mozart or Schubert, the bass part usually has real importance as it’s the harmonic ground of the piece – every change in colour in the higher melodies depends on it. The person who plays the bass is usually also the one who plays the pedal, so it’s doubly important, but it’s the melody that listeners usually listen to. I’d say that if the bass is good, the melody is easier to play.

CR: Is there a difference in playing with your sister?

LB: Oh yes, there’s a big difference.

SB: All your ideas and thoughts and whatever you don’t agree with – it all comes out. You have to be honest with each other. Even so, you have to be careful. Too much honesty and you might end up being too emotional or having a row. We know how far we can go.

CR: Do you ever have arguments?

SB: Yeah! But I hear about friends in string quartets having terrible fights too. It’s part of working together and being on tour together. We also live together in Paris.

LB: It’s really hard to find somewhere in Paris where you can play all day; we’re a noise problem. One piano is already a lot of noise, but two pianos is really tough on your neighbours. So we live in special accommodations provided by the Conservatoire de Paris. It’s full of students and ex-students, people playing all kinds of instruments, composers, jazz musicians. Fortunately our place is slightly separate from the main building. Thank God! I don’t want to hear a French horn every morning at 9am.

CR: Are you travelling a lot these days?

LB: Yes. We just came back from doing two weeks of concerts in Japan, which was wonderful. The Japanese are reserved but also very warm. The way they applaud at the end is amazing. They clap completely differently from Westerners. It sounds like rain: very fast and with a higher pitch than in Europe. And the Japanese are always asking for autographs and want to have their picture taken with you.

SB: In France, the audience all applaud together in a standing ovation, but it’s more about tradition than appreciation. It doesn’t matter if they liked it or not; everyone gets the same treatment. It doesn’t mean much. It’s like that long sign-off at the end of a formal French letter: Veuillez agréer mes sentiments distingués. It doesn’t mean anything.

LB: Which is very different from the applause in London. I recently went to see The Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and the applause was fantastic – really spontaneous and lively. I loved the piece, but it was really the audience that excited me most.

CR: Do you always play at your best when you’re performing?

SB: You’re sometimes better in rehearsals, actually. The concert can go well, but the rehearsal has the edge. When you have a chance to play the same programme lots of times and you get to live with it for a bit, then you can really progress. That’s what big-name pianists get to do. They become known for a particular repertoire. We’re still in the middle, so sometimes we get the chance to repeat a programme over several nights, but sometimes we’re doing one thing in one concert and another in the next – we may do five different programmes in 15 days. Everyone starts out like this. Once you can do the same piece night after night, you become much freer on stage. You’re no longer worried about the details. You inhabit the piece. You are really interpreting it, and hopefully it’s differently every time.

CR: What happens if you make a mistake? Do you give each other a dirty look?

SB: Oh God, no. Everyone makes mistakes. Even the biggest stars do. That’s just human. The worst is to play a piece the same every time, or to appear not to understand it.

LB: When you’ve done something stupid, you know you’ve done it; you hear it. You don’t need someone else to tell you. She knows that I know.

CR: If you go on holiday, how long can you be away from your piano before you get itchy fingers?

LB: Two weeks.

SB: Ten days. I’m better when I haven’t played for a while. It’s good to have a bit of distance and come back refreshed.

CR: Can you really fatigue your hands?

SB: Oh yeah, Brahms or Rachmaninov can take a lot out of you – and I’m playing them a lot at the moment. Schumann and Bach are other favourites.

LB: My favourites are Mozart and Schubert, even though Mozart is difficult. But then again you have music that you like to listen to, and music that you like to play, and they can be two totally different things. For instance, I love to play Stravinsky – it’s so energetic. But listen to our Stravinsky CD? I just couldn’t.

Terry: Tricia regularly resigns.

Tricia: That’s not true. I occasionally say things like: “That’s it – I’m going. I’m not working with you any more,” and it’s because he doesn’t smile enough during the day. If it’s a mad moment I’ll say, “I didn’t marry a businessman” because Terry will worry about the finances or the responsibility.

Terry: Trish thinks about the people working for us. I tend to think about the deadline, so I’ll go through a day without food, whereas Trish will think about food every two hours.

Tricia: I was a teacher and a mum before we started working together, and that’s kind of the secret of who I am. I managed the finances at home so it was obvious that I would help Terry with that at work. Terry said, “We need to sell advertising, can you phone a few people up?” Creatively I started putting my chip in a bit later, and he didn’t like it at all.

Terry: The minute I found Trish was on my territory, I got possessive. But then I found that she has very good judgement on editorial stuff. And she’s much better at words than I am. I’ll struggle for an hour just to put three words down.

Tricia: Not three.

Terry: I always look for someone who has a potential to write, and that’s the way that journalists like Dylan Jones or Kate Flett or Alix Sharkey would start. The i-D academy is finding people who have an ability, and then I think I can try and double their strength. Most people, when they start at i-D, have never had a job, so they don’t have a defined style. Nick Knight was a student when he showed me his portfolio. I asked him to do some pictures of his friends in Bournemouth, and that was his first published work. Stylist Simon Foxton I met when I was working at Fiorucci.

Tricia: But at the end of the day, you are the creative director. It’s a joint thing – they will have their ideas, but Terry will also have his, and it’ll be done together. You can be a very hard taskmaster. I’m always kinder.

Alex: Given that you used to be a teacher, Tricia, aren’t you quite strict with the staff?

Terry: Nobody working for i-D has ever seen Trish get angry.

Tricia: Oh, don’t!

Terry: Because she’s never had to. There’s a respect. The guidelines are clear.

Tricia: My son, Matt, says, “Oh mum, you always say it’s a matter of principle.” For example, if I can help it you won’t see pictures in the magazine of people looking cool smoking cigarettes. I just think it’s really irresponsible and I hate the way the cigarette companies are now going to the developing world and selling them there.

Alex: But then again...

Terry:...we used to carry tobacco advertising. I even worked on ad campaigns.

Tricia: But we did stop. Terry’s allowed me to have much more of a voice. I mean, there’s no way you would ever do that now, would you?

Terry: I discourage it, but when we photograph David Hockney and he doesn’t take the cigarette out of his mouth...

Tricia: And David Lynch is the other one. Difficult! What I feel is that if people believe that we can influence the way people think and so spend thousands of pounds advertising a handbag or a pair of shoes, then we have a responsibility for what we put in the magazine. We wanted to be as broad a vision as possible: multiracial, multiethnic.

Terry: As grandparents, you want to feel that six generations down there’s some value system that you’ve managed to infiltrate. i-D has broadened people’s perspectives. It’s not unusual to see mixed races on the covers of magazines now, whereas when i-D started it was very unusual.

Tricia: I think the important thing is not to preach or be holier than thou. We’re not saving lives here; we’re helping creative people. We’re maybe opening a few eyes, and hopefully our own, too, along the way.

Terry: We’re fortunate in that since 1980 we’ve had a place in Wales. That connection with nature has been something that both Matt and Kayt have grown up with, and I think that gives you a privileged perspective – not everyone gets to see the dawn over a frozen field with the mist rising.

Tricia: It’s not a posh house that we have; it’s a very little cottage with a beautiful view. Terry taught me about nature. He once took me to Dorset, and I stood on the top of a hill and I was, like: “God, there are no villages.” That feeling of driving out of London... (Tricia exhales loudly) ...is just extraordinary.

Alex: Doesn’t it sit a bit oddly that nature lovers like yourselves are working in fashion – an industry predicated on things being obsolete after six months?

Terry: We’re all going to be obsolete in whatever – things have a lifespan. The big issue, I believe, is that people in fashion try and hold on to a vision of youth, whereas I love the rose as a bud and I love it as it’s falling off the bush, so I love the natural order of things.

Tricia: If you look through the pages of i-D, you see fashion is the excuse for what we do. We’ve said that for a long time.

Terry: Well, more than that.

Tricia: In i-D you’ll often see vintage pieces, so we’re not saying: “Buy this and then go and throw it away.” Do something else with it. Send it to Oxfam. Reuse it. Wherever we can promote people who are doing things in a sustainable way, we like to do that. Having said that, nobody’s going to buy something just because it’s worthy, if they don’t look good in it, and we fly too often to be able to make any judgements about things being sustainable. I can buy clever products and turn the water off when I’m cleaning my teeth, but our kids live in America, and our granddaughters are there. Am I prepared not to see my granddaughters?

Terry: My belief is that you present things and people can make up their own minds. We don’t like an ethos that comes down as a critique on someone’s personal taste. We’ve never been about “This is in, this is out.” We don’t see ourselves as rule makers. We are fans.

Tricia: I think the other thing to say is that we can’t possibly see ourselves as a youth magazine – I mean look at the age of us. We’re grandparents.

Terry: Well, it’s an attitude, isn’t it? You can get a 12-year-old with wisdom and an 80-year-old who’s a blinkered bigot.

Alex: Do you think you’ll still be making i-D at 80?

Terry: I don’t imagine as a hands-on thing.

Tricia: Not the responsibility of everybody’s jobs, but I think we’ll still be batting ideas about, for sure. We’ve just got a place in upstate New York because our son lives there. He found us this house, an old horse farm called Clearview Farm – I mean, what an amazing name to inherit. To have an eye and a wink as part of i-D’s motif and then to have Clearview Farm... I’m a great believer in all those sorts of things. I don’t think stuff is coincidental at all.

Terry: It has a bath with a view.

Tricia: Friends of ours had a bath with an amazing view of the mountains, and I said, “Oh God, one day I’d love a bath with a view.” In London, we have two baths in our bathroom. We bought the house in 1970, and we had a really small bathroom, but there was a chair in it. I’d take a bath and say, “Come and talk to me,” so Terry would sit and talk. At some point we decided to make a bigger bathroom, and we were, like: “Ooh, we can have two baths!” So we do. I’m not a great one for sharing my bathwater, much as I love Terry.