I have always admired Viviane Sassen’s photography. Many years ago I met her commercial agent in London and saw her early fashion work which was tight. Tight in the sense that it was simply composed, and lit with a raw, uncompromising flash-on-camera. So simple and tight, in fact, that is had a sort of Tonka Toy naivety and would make a good lesson for photography students on how to compose.
To me the way in which the over-produced fashion magazines of the late 90s/early 00s allowed pure fashion and fine art to coexist has oiled her transition over to the high art world. It’s good: her work doesn’t engender the typical spaghetti artspeak which more dyed-in-the-wool art photography can spark, and it’s beautiful. A New York Times critic who was obviously battling for words, and hadn’t been to Africa, said, ‘Sassen’s images ‘convey how strangely vivid and tantalizingly sad the world can seem to a mind and eye divested of the usual filters of perception’. Right buddy.
The work is fairly brutal because the people and faces which appear in her photography are generally cast in shadow and reduced to parts in a strict formal plan. I suspect that her conscience is pricking and she would rather sever heads than make millions from smiling/abject black faces. One also gets the feeling that she has no clue whatsoever about what runs Africa so she has decided to address it on a totally superficial level, and I don’t think the photographs go a helluva lot further than that.
The lack of clues in relation to identity in her work and her technical and formal aplomb do, however, make for compelling viewing because solving such beautiful puzzles in such pristine, high-white, environments is always a whole lot of fun.
I made these shots in 2004.
Comments