Viviane Sassen

Childhood in Kenya and Distance from Two Places

Sassen lived in Kenya from the ages of two to five, while her father worked at a clinic. After returning to the Netherlands, she has said that she felt little sense of belonging in Europe, yet felt like a foreigner when she traveled to Africa.^*3 In Flamboya and Parasomnia, she does not reconstruct Kenya as a lost homeland. She overlays present-day photographs with sensory fragments left from childhood: light, color, bodies, fear, and dreams.

These personal memories share the work with a longer history of white Western photographers depicting Black people in Africa. Colonial ethnographic photography, travel images, and advertising often presented individuals as examples of a region or race. Sassen has stated that she remains conscious of the photographer’s power and responsibility toward the subject.^*9 Omitting national and personal names and treating bodies as forms can convey the uncertainty of memory, while also distancing individual lives and social circumstances. Both effects have shaped the work’s reception.

From Modeling to Making Her Own Images of the Body

Sassen studied fashion in the early 1990s and worked as a model. She has described turning to self-portraiture after feeling uncomfortable when male photographers asked her to “seduce the camera,” using photography to make her own image of her body.^*13 The “male gaze” names a system that positions women as bodies to be looked at before recognizing them as acting subjects. It extends across painting, nude photography, film, advertising, and fashion.^*1

Sassen responded by covering faces with arms or shadows, cropping elbows and knees outside the frame, and overlapping different parts of the body. She has described this approach to sexuality, developed against images shaped by the male gaze, as “fractured and disjointed.”^*19 Here fragmentation refers to precise choices of pose and cropping that make it difficult to identify a face, follow the direction of a body, or see exactly where clothing begins.

Fashion commissions still require the clothing and brand to remain legible. Within those demands, Sassen uses light, pose, and cropping to hold product information and bodily ambiguity in the same frame. In her autonomous work, the same operations address memory, desire, and anonymity. Publication venue, commission, and photobook sequence alter the function of a shared photographic vocabulary.

Obscuring the Face and Complicating the Boundary Between Clothing and Body

Arms cover faces, elbows and knees are cut by the frame, limbs from two people overlap, and the colors of skin, walls, and fabric continue into one another. Many compositions resist an immediate account of how the upper and lower body connect, how many people appear, or where a garment begins and ends. Conventional portraiture often gives the face the central task of communicating identity or psychology. In Sassen’s pictures, the arrangement of posture, skin, fabric, and background is recognized first. She has spoken of limiting the description of a specific person in favor of more generalized images or archetypes.^*5

Obscuring the face removes a model from a standardized image of beauty and makes it harder to infer character or emotion immediately from expression. In photographs made in Africa without personal or place names, the same operation can weaken the subject’s social specificity. Recent criticism has noted that Sassen’s images of Black subjects may approach a Western photographic tradition that generalized African people as anonymous bodies, and Sassen has reconsidered earlier work in response.^*17

Under strong sunlight, allowing the face or torso to fall into deep shadow removes descriptive detail and strengthens surrounding blocks of color and contour. Shadow also records the spatial relation among light source, subject, and photographer. UMBRA combines photographs, moving images, poetry, and mirrors, bringing the viewer’s shadow and reflection into the work.^*8 Shadow functions as both a dramatic visual effect and a photographic decision about which information a body will reveal.

Using the Speed and Constraints of Fashion Production as an Experimental Setting

Fashion shoots are shaped by publication deadlines, the need to communicate garments, brand requirements, and the coordination of models, stylists, makeup, and lighting within limited time. Sassen values the speed, energy, and teamwork of fashion as a “playground,” and has said that constraints can produce a stronger sense of freedom to experiment.^*11

At the same time, she wants photographs to resist consumption at a glance within a culture of abundant images—to confuse viewers or hold their attention longer.^*11 Garments remain identifiable, and the body does not dissolve completely into abstraction. Instead, the connections among face, limbs, shadow, and background shift just enough to keep the image legible as fashion while delaying a clear grasp of the person and pose.

This form developed through repeated experiments with color, pose, and the connection between body and background inside commercial production. Fashion’s collaborative structure and rapid decisions allowed many variations to be tested; in personal projects, the resulting methods became tools for working with memory and anonymity.

Flamboya and Parasomnia: Building Memory from Fragments of People and Place

Flamboya (2008) edits people, architecture, plants, and shadows photographed across East Africa into a sequence of saturated color and emphatic forms. The book does not explain the social circumstances of each country in turn. Reds, diagonals, bent bodies, and hard sunlight recur from page to page. Foam describes the series through the recovery of memory and questions about how photography registers its subjects.^{*18 *6}

Parasomnia takes its title from abnormal states associated with sleep and consists of unnamed figures and locations in Africa whose countries Sassen deliberately withheld. MoMA presented the series as an attempt to recover memories of growing up in Kenya through remnants of dreams.^*3 The absence of biographical and geographical explanation conveys the discontinuity of memory, while also risking the compression of several African countries into a single dreamlike stage. The work’s form and the criticism directed toward it arise from the same omissions.^*7

In and Out of Fashion and Analemma: Editing Commissioned Images Through Seasons and Repetition

In and Out of Fashion removes images commissioned for magazines and advertising from their original layouts and re-edits Sassen’s fashion work as a body of pictures. Even as garments and brands change, covered faces, shadows, folded bodies, and continuities of color between figure and background recur, allowing the demands of individual assignments and the photographer’s decisions to remain visible together.

For Analemma: Fashion Photography 1992–2012, roughly 350 images were projected in a loop across walls and floor, while mirrors and projection surfaces further divided the body.^*14 Fashion photographs designed to be replaced each season became a continuous moving sequence. The speed of commercial consumption entered the structure of the installation itself.

UMBRA, Hot Mirror, and PHOSPHOR: From Photographs to Books, Moving Images, and Space

In UMBRA, shadows made by hard light recur across photographs, moving images, poetry, and mirrors. In the video installation Totem, viewers’ shadows and reflections overlap the projected image, making the body that looks at the work part of the scene.^*8 The operations of concealment and exposure developed within single photographs expand into the lighting of the gallery and the viewer’s position.

Hot Mirror re-edited photographs from the previous decade alongside new collages, extending close-up, reversal, cutting, and the adjacency of different images into both book and exhibition structures.^*15 PHOSPHOR placed more than thirty years of fashion work and autonomous art in the same retrospective, moving among photography, paint, collage, and film.^*2 With each change of medium, the concealment of parts of the body shifts into page sequence, wall arrangement, projection, and reflection.

In Relation to Lee Miller: From Modeling to Authoring the Image of the Body

Miller used solarization, extreme close-up, and the estrangement of ordinary objects, claiming Surrealist techniques as an author. Sassen uses saturated color, styling, location work, and collage in both magazine commissions and personal series. A Guardian review identifies landscape, the body, darkness, and the strangeness of the everyday as points of contact despite the difference between Miller’s monochrome and Sassen’s color.^*16 For Sassen, the commercial requirement to show clothing adds a further decision: how much of the body can be withheld while the image remains readable as fashion.

In 2018, The Hepworth Wakefield presented Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain alongside Sassen’s Hot Mirror.^*15 Both Lee Miller and Sassen had worked in front of the camera as models before becoming photographers who shaped images of their own and others’ bodies. Miller turned to photography in resistance to the passivity assigned to the model, while Sassen sought forms of sexuality different from those she encountered under the male gaze of 1990s fashion photography.^*19

Fashion Photography After Steichen, Bourdin, Newton, and Teller

Charlotte Cotton described Sassen’s work in the afterword to In and Out of Fashion as an “axis shift” in fashion photography. Sean O’Hagan likewise argues that she changed the genre’s appearance in a manner comparable to Bourdin and Teller.^*10 The shift does not depend on eccentric poses or saturated color alone. It lies in repeatedly producing pictures that still communicate clothing while withholding an immediate account of who is shown, how the body connects, and where the scene takes place.

Sassen cites Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, and Juergen Teller as predecessors who joined fashion to a strong personal style.^*11 Bourdin and Newton placed clothing within narrative scenes of sexuality, danger, and power, while Teller brought an intimate, improvised appearance into magazines. Sassen reduces facial expression and narrative cause, asking viewers to read clothing, skin, shadow, and background as arrangements on a shared plane.

Edward Steichen brought an artist’s lighting and composition into the mass commercial media of Condé Nast during the 1920s and 1930s. Clare Grafik of The Photographers’ Gallery compares Steichen and Sassen as artists from different periods who treated fashion imagery as a field of invention outside the restrictions conventionally associated with fine art.^*12

MoMA’s New Photography 2011: Using Commercial Techniques to Address Memory

MoMA’s New Photography 2011 selected six artists to present the international reach and varied working methods of contemporary photography.^*4 Moyra Davey used mailed photographs, Doug Rickard worked with Google Street View, and Zhang Dali drew on propaganda archives. Sassen was introduced through her use of people and places in Africa to reconstruct memories and dreams connected to her childhood in Kenya.^*4

“New” in the series referred to more than the artists’ age; it also encompassed work that altered photography’s boundaries and uses.^*20 Sassen used color, lighting, and pose developed through fashion production without organizing belonging and memory as reportage or chronological autobiography. Images with the immediate appeal of commercial photography delayed the identification of people, places, and stories, appearing in the exhibition as one of several distinct contemporary approaches to the medium.

Photographic Operations Across Fashion, Art, and Images of Africa

In fashion work, lighting, pose, color, and styling direct attention toward clothing and brand. In Sassen’s personal projects, the same techniques recall childhood memory through fragments of color and posture, obscure faces, and complicate the boundary between figure and background. As she has explained, fashion photography is assigned the task of communicating a product, while autonomous art is not.^*10 The difference between the fields lies in what the same operations are made to serve, as much as in style.

In work made in Africa, obscuring faces removes people from standardized beauty imagery while also reducing personal names and social detail. Sassen’s memories of childhood and the power of a white Westerner to edit Black bodies and places occupy the same pictures. Assessment of the work therefore extends beyond saturated color and shadow to the editorial decisions governing whose memory organizes the series and how much information about the photographed person remains.

Sassen brings lighting, casting, styling, and pose to the center of the image as processes that show clothing while directing how a body will be read. Viewers are drawn first to intense color, then move their eyes to distinguish face, garment, limbs, and place. That delay makes it possible to compare commercial attraction, the photographer’s memory, and the model’s anonymity as different effects produced by the same techniques.