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Phosphor. By Viviane Sassen.
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Photographs by Viviane Sassen
Prestel, Munich, Germany, 2024. 528 pp.
If the name Viviane Sassen immediately conjures up images of haute couture, that’s understandable. The 51-year-old Dutch photographer has worked both sides of the fashion lens, as both model and image-maker, gradually gaining stature in the exclusive world of luxury brand photography. At this point her Rolodex reads like a Paris runway checklist. She’s been commissioned by Miu Miu, Stella McCartney, Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta, Dior, Lancel, and more.
After appearing initially in advertisements and magazines around the globe, her photographs have made their way increasingly into monographs. Sassen is a prolific creator, and she has authored or contributed to more than twenty photobooks since 2008. Her latest, Phosphor, may be the most comprehensive to date. It is certainly the largest, weighing in at 500+ pages, 1.5” thick, and several pounds. The weighty softcover tome is published in conjunction with a large traveling mid-career retrospective. It is prefaced with 5 critical essays (translated into French and English), and the main body is comprised of hundreds of photographs stretching from the late 1980s through 2023.
Most of Phosphor’s images have appeared before elsewhere, either in advertisements, previous monographs, or both. In terms of pictures, Sassen fans will be on familiar ground. But the book’s bifurcated design casts them here in a novel format. The book is comprised of two inverted halves, each sequenced chronologically toward a midpoint, where the format flips 180 degrees. One half features personal work. The other half is magazine assignments. The reader can begin at either end. Regardless of starting point, the process will be roughly the same: Behind a bright painted cover — one side green, the obverse blue — comes a deluge of photographs leading steadily from Sassen’s origins to the present.
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Phosphor’s format divides Sassen’s oeuvre into two separate piles, fine art and hired gigs. But the reality is somewhat messier. Like some colleagues — most notably Roe Ethridge and his comparably sized mid-career retrospective Polychronic — Sassen has long blurred the lines of art and commerce. Many of the same motifs run through both halves of the book: self-portraiture, human forms, bold color, ragged physicality, jarring compositions, a recurring fascination with Africa, where she spent part of her childhood. She’s a master of wry composition, unexpected cropping, and look-twice layering. Many photos could slip easily into either half. If Phosphor’s imposed dichotomy feels artificial, that may be exactly the point. It takes a winking stance against silly labels. High end commissions be damned. You get the sense she’d create them herself, even in an unpaid vacuum.
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In any case, Sassen’s career trajectory seems clear: Her work has moved inexorably over time toward abstraction and surrealism. These strains have been evident for a while, but in her early photos they were confined to simple collage, complementary hues, and formal alignment. Since roughly 2017 Sassen’s creative tool kit has broadened considerably. Phosphor’s burgeoning middle section — and its expressive core — features recent work from the past half dozen years. Commercial gigs and personal work meet here in dazzling rush of techniques, invention, experiments, and flat out fun. As always, models create a visual baseline. But Sassen then blasts off into the artistic stratosphere. She paints directly onto prints, rephotographs elements, montages with scissors and/or Photoshop, slices, dices, saturates, colors outside the lines, and generally has a ball. The overall impression is of a mature artist with numerous skills at her disposal, and a thirst to mix and match them freely.
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“Maybe I call myself a surrealist,” Sassen is quoted in the opening essay. “I also think of myself as a sculptor.” Whatever the label, she’s found a real groove at mid-career. I won’t say she’s settled into it, or into anything that might be called static. Her process feels fluid, and it’s hard to know what she’ll be doing ten years from now. For the time being, Phosphor lays down a marker. This is a selective survey of where she began, her artistic evolution over time, and a healthy sampling of current or recent work. If the name Viviane Sassen conjured up images of haute couture before, it’s time to think again.
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