source: rencontres-arles

Aux Pays-Bas et à l’étranger, Viviane Sassen est surtout connue pour ses photographies aux couleurs vives et presque surréelles de l’Afrique qui ont fait d’elle la lauréate du prix de Rome 2007. Pourtant, à côté de ses travaux personnels, elle travaille depuis longtemps comme photographe de mode. Son travail dans ce domaine est d’autant plus reconnu qu’elle s’est forgé un style inimitable.
Cette rétrospective présente des images élaborées à la manière de tableaux ou de collages, fruits de son imagination et de sa créativité. Ce style, peu fréquent dans le climat actuel frileux et soumis aux lois du marché de la photographie de mode, est typique du travail de Viviane Sassen. Au cours des 17 dernières années, Sassen a développé un langage personnel à la lisière du surréalisme – autour de corps mêlés, de compositions sculpturales et de formes abstraites –, parfois déconcertant mais toujours fascinant et plein d’énergie. Les clichés de mode de Sassen sont caractérisés par leur force créatrice et une beauté surréaliste. Par contraste avec son travail personnel reconnu, ses photographies de mode sont des commandes créées en étroite collaboration avec une équipe de stylistes, de directeurs artistiques, de mannequins et de maquilleurs. Sassen peut ainsi traiter la photographie de mode comme un terrain de jeu ultime, un lieu où travailler rapidement et intuitivement tout en profitant des avantages à disposer d’une équipe professionnelle pour mener à bien ses expériences – elle appelle cela son « laboratoire ».
L’approche spontanée, non commerciale et très personnelle de Viviane Sassen explique que ses clichés de mode aient largement dépassé les frontières habituelles du genre. Le domaine de la mode lui laisse le champ libre pour mener des expériences qui génèrent un réservoir de matériel à partir duquel elle développe le langage de sa pratique personnelle.
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source: rencontres-arles

In the Netherlands and abroad Viviane Sassen is known foremost as an artist, whose somewhat surreal, colourful photographs of Africa won her the Prix de Rome in 2007. Alongside her autonomous work, however, she has long worked as a fashion photographer. Her fashion work is held in high regard, and she has carved out her own unmistakable style.

The retrospective shows images built up like a painting or a collage and which arise in free association and creativity. These are not generally prominent aspects in the cautious climate of today’s largely commercially-driven fashion photography, but they are typical of Viviane Sassen’s fashion photography. Over the last 17 years Sassen has developed a personal language that is sometimes surreal—with intertwined bodies, sculptural compositions and abstract forms—and on occasion perhaps bewildering, but it is always fascinating and full of energy. Sassen’s fashion photography is marked by both innovative strength and a surrealistic beauty. In contrast to her renowned autonomous work, Sassen’s fashion photography is commissioned work that is created in close collaboration with a team of stylists, art directors, models and make-up artists. This means Sassen can treat fashion photography as the ultimate playground, somewhere she can work quickly and intuitively while enjoying the additional benefits of having a professional team on hand to facilitate her experiments. She calls this her ‘Laboratory’.
Viviane Sassen’s spontaneous, non-commercial, and characteristically individual approach has ensured that her fashion photography goes far beyond the usual confines of this medium. The fashion domain affords her the space to carry out experiments that generate a reservoir of material with which to develop the language of her autonomous work.
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source: smileinyourface

Editorial featuring favorite model Anais Pouliot that favorite photographer Viviane Sassen shot for Double magazine‘s Spring/Summer 2013 issue.
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source: huismarseillenl

The photography of Viviane Sassen (Amsterdam, 1972) is in a class of its own. The intuitive way in which Sasses approaches her subjects is entirely personal, independent of other examples or reference frameworks. She often seeds the body as a sculpture, and concepts of revelations and concealment help to create the riddles in her images. Sassen makes effective use of the mystery of shadow and the flamboyant expressivity of colour. She has also achieved a special intimacy with certain models, so that her photos can sometimes be erotic, but at the same time they can be open, rich in contrast, or explosive. Her images are invariably intriguing and remarkable, and they are, occassionally, somewhat surreal. Over the course of her career Viviane Sassen has produced a flood of marvellous images, many of which are of Africa, the continent in which she spent part of her youth.

In 2007 Viviane Sassen was awarded the Prix de Rome and in 2011 the ICP Infinity Award for Applied and Fashion Photography. Besides being much lauded for her independent photographic art, Viviane Sassen is also a prominent fashion photographer who has produced campaigns for fashion houses such as Carven, Stella McCartney-Adidas and Missoni, and editorials for magazines such as Numéro, Double, Another Magazine and Dazed & Confused. In contrast to her art work, her fashion work arises in close, spontaneous collaboration with stylists, models and make-up artists. For Viviane Sassen fashion photography forms the ultimate playground, a domain in which she can work quickly and intuitively, assisted by a professional team, to perform an experiment. Her fashion work has become a rich source, a laboratory, from which new ideas can continually be drawn.