Inez van Lamsweerde/Vinoodh Matadin. Pretty Much Everything

Somewhere between a Yohji Yamamoto campaign and a woman's face that was built as much as photographed, the line between fashion picture and pure invention stops holding. Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin have spent more than thirty years erasing that line on purpose, and Pretty Much Everything is the ledger of the effort: a doorstop survey of two people who sign every image with one name and mean it.

They began working together in the late 1980s, out of the Netherlands, at the precise moment the computer arrived in the retouching suite. Where most photographers treated digital tools as a way to fix a picture, this pair treated them as a way to build one that could not otherwise exist. The early-nineties composites are the origin story: grafted limbs, smoothed joins, the airbrushed and doll-jointed women of the 'Thank You Thighmaster' pictures, bodies and faces stitched into a seamless impossibility that looked, unnervingly, like an ordinary magazine ad. The tools were crude then, a mouse and a monitor doing what a scalpel and an airbrush once did, and the seams they could hide were the whole game.

What lands hardest now is how early they saw it coming. The retouched, faintly inhuman face that scrolls past everyone all day was sitting in their work two decades before the phone made it universal. Their images carry a flaw of unease under the polish, a sense that beauty this frictionless has been tampered with, and that the tampering is the message. They were painting the uncanny while the industry was still congratulating itself on getting skin to glow. Look long enough and the pleasure curdles into a small dread about how much of any face on any screen is now built the same way.

The survey ranges far past the experiments: Björk mid-transformation on album covers, house campaigns for the biggest labels in fashion, portraits that hold still where the composites churn. Their album work alone could fill a book, image-worlds built for a single song and then abandoned. Their self-portrait work threads through as a counterweight, most plainly in the 'Kissing Vinoodh' image that anchors the companion Art Edition, an intimacy set against all the manufacture. The two registers explain each other. The invented faces feel colder because the private ones are so warm.

The portraits deserve their own attention. A face by these two often looks lit from a place the light does not come from, sculpted at the edges until it hovers between a photograph and a rendering. Lady Gaga, Kate Moss, a dozen designers and dancers: each is handed the same treatment, flattered and estranged at once, so that even a straight head-and-shoulders carries a small charge of the artificial. The effect is seductive and slightly cold, and the coldness is deliberate.

A puzzle sits in the authorship, and the pictures quietly answer it. Two people, one signature, no visible seam between who did what: the same seamlessness they impose on a face they impose on their own partnership, until the matter of authorship stops being answerable and starts being beside the point. Fashion photography tends to run on a single dominating eye. This body of work runs on a merger, and it is stronger for refusing the myth of the lone author.

For a photographer running a studio now, the practical lesson is not the software. It is the nerve to decide what a picture is before the shutter, to treat the final image as something authored in full instead of found and tidied. The camera is the least of it; the decisions that matter happen in the mind before the light is even set. Their work insists that manipulation belongs at the front of the process, a decision made before the shutter rather than a rescue performed after it.

The title is a promise and a warning in the same breath. At the scale of pretty much everything, the campaign work does blur, and a viewer can lose the thread that made the early pictures startling. Comprehensiveness honours a career and flattens it at once, and this volume does both across its considerable weight. A tighter edit would have argued harder; this one would rather show the whole road.

Anyone learning to build images now should read it backward, starting with the early-nineties composites before a single recent campaign. Watch what they predicted, then look up from the page at every feed in the room. The industry is still catching up.