Photographers in Focus: Viviane Sassen
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- Опубліковано 7 жов 2024
- For Dutch-born artist and fashion photographer Viviane Sassen, it is not Arnhem or Amsterdam but a village in the remote west of rural Kenya that holds the biggest sway over her creative voice. Sassen, the subject of the latest episode of our flagship series Photographers in Focus, spent her early years in the East African country, learning much from its “bright sunlight and dark shadows.” It is a subject to which she has returned again and again.
Since returning to northern Europe to live and study, Sassen has established herself across the fields of fashion photography and art, and is much lauded for her stylistic calling-card of geometric shapes and abstracted bodies. These images, observed the veteran shooter in an interview earlier this year, are like “puzzles,” where she “brings a few elements together and experiments” while always looking “for that little bit of magic.”
Contributing regularly to titles including Dazed and Confused, Pop, and AnOther, Sassen has collaborated on a wide range of global campaigns including those for Stella McCartney, Hermès, Miu Miu, and Missoni. And yet, despite the diversity of her photographic portfolio, her images always return to her earliest memories of light, shape, and shadow, and to the people and places of Kenya. Her 2014 photobook Pikin Slee is illustrative of this-a collection that directly referenced the village of her upbringing, which is inhabited by the ancestors of former slaves who escaped Dutch rule. It represents a studied exploration of the beauty of everyday, seemingly normal objects and arrangements-a bowl of grain; a spool of wire in stark monochrome-which are imbued with intense mystery and symbolic significance.
The same can be said of her commercial photography, where sharp contrasts, bold forms, and a close attention to the play of shadow and light, have cemented her reputation as one of the leading figures in contemporary fashion imagery. At the same time, her images-which are subtly informed by Surrealism-often have an unsettling and experimental edge, leading to the suggestion of darker themes underlying her often vibrant compositional worlds.
Sassen’s work was recognized in 2015 with the award of a Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, in response to Umbra, her exhibition at Nederlands Fotomuseum. She has also been the recipient of The Prix de Rome in 2007 and, in 2013, showed work at the Venice Biennale.
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Thank you for featuring her, she's by far one of my favorite contemporary photographers today. What a talent and eye she has! More please!!
One of my favorites!
her work is so powerful
Europeans photographing Africans great your work has such substance it's really what the world needs
Wow! This artist is very, very good. Will have to do some research on her.
Thank you for making this video! Her work is stunning.
🤍🤸🏼.
Some strikingly beautiful and inspirational images. Thanks for sharing.
She has always been my idle. This series is amazing. You guys feature really amazing photographers like her and Jeff Wall. I'd love to see Gregory Halpern and Matthew Genitempo as well. And maybe Jitka Hanzlova and Rinke Dijkstra...
love this. watch it over and over again
Yes! Same here. There’s something magical in this vid
Wow I love you talented work....
Beautiful work
Fantastic work. Thank you
amazing photographs
So good, love her photography.
I love this so much.
I wish I had one of your beautiful photos....
wow. is there anyone more original or more inventive than viviane sassen?
She is inspiring.
anybody know what process she was doing with the liquid on the prints?
Nikolai Hagen she’s mounting the photos
Amazing!
Awesome!
Amazing!!!❤
To paraphrase: "I go to Africa to use the people as symbols."
Cool
Fuq off
as opposed to taking photos of people in Amsterdam? I dont see the difference
@@kimcheankoy7540 A white European saying, "they (i.e. Africans)... are not depicted as themselves but rather as an idea" is problematic, as far as I see it. I'd argue that such a statement is rooted in exactly the kind of Orientalist thinking that justified racism, colonialism, and slavery.
David Summers As an Asian, I see it more in terms her relationship with the subjects. Whether they’re treated as professionals and compensated for their work or not. Whether these models are British or African, her photos don’t seem to capitalize on race. What do you think?
David Summers What’s wrong with seeing people as symbols? We see Thor, an actor in a movie, as a symbol of a hero. We sculpt men and women into marble, as divine creatures of God, as artwork, as symbols of materialized beauty.
So good !
beautiful
very rare
what is she dripping on her prints?
Fantastic images. Once you create concepts like those you are definitely committed to a great deal of work, lol.
You misunderstood the power dynamic you are a white women with a camera in a black county you exists at the description of the people of that country. The art you produce is also at the description of the people. Where do see the power as a White women that you speak of.
Africa is Exotic.
The vivid dreams might have been from the malaria prophylaxis you might have been taking.
What is powerful about her images of black people?
@CharlesWilliams, art is subjective, you either get it or you don’t. If looking at black models challenges you, that says more about you than Sassen.