There are few fashion photographers who can look back over a four-decade career like Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. On November 2 at the CFDA Awards, the organization will honor the pair with the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award. The prize commemorates their deep impact and contribution to the visual language of the industry.

Both Dutch natives, the two first met while studying at the Amsterdam Fashion Academy before connecting as fashion collaborators in 1986. Over the course of a generation, the wife-and-husband power duo have crafted an experimental, high-energy, and star-powered signature look that spans a long lasting relationship with Björk, advertising work for labels such as Chanel, Miu Miu, and Yohji Yamamoto, and many major magazine editorials, including in the international pages of Vogue.

The duo started contributing to American Vogue in 1995. In a 1996 body-hugging spread titled “Futuristic Fit,” Van Lamsweerde and Matadin were described as up-and-comers utilizing brand-new technology at the forefront of their hyperrealistic creations—they were early adopters of Photoshop’s precursor, Quantel Paintbox. “We wanted to capture a kind of frozen high energy to create a surrealistic effect,” Lamsweerde told Vogue at the time.

As you’ll see in this selection of portraiture and fashion work, their pictures have a joyfully explosive quality. Their palette feels Technicolor, and the sitters seem to take on superpowers, filled with a sense of spirit and motion. Also often a sense of humor; see for example Karlie Kloss with a single caterpillar-like eyebrow. And talk about million dollar smiles—no one gets subjects to say cheese (or kaas, as the case may be) like Inez and Vinoodh.