Viviane Sassen

Flamboya is the seminal first monograph by Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen. The book compiles over fifty photographs taken between 2004 and 2008 across various African countries, including Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, and Uganda. The title is inspired by the flamboyant tree, which scatters vibrant red and orange blossoms across sub-Saharan Africa.

The project is deeply informed by Sassen's childhood biography; she lived in Kenya from ages two to five while her father worked at a local hospital. Her return to the continent as an adult sparked a complex artistic exploration of memory, belonging, and foreignness. Rather than presenting a conventional, monolithic Western depiction of Africa, Sassen embraces an ambiguous perspective that oscillates between deep closeness and inescapable distance.

Visually, Flamboya subverts the traditional boundaries of documentary photography by injecting a highly stylized, performative, and fashion-adjacent aesthetic vocabulary. Sassen collaborates intimately with her subjects to construct carefully art-directed tableaux, utilizing harsh, direct equatorial sunlight and deep, graphic shadows. By frequently obscuring the faces of her models through dramatic casting of shade, cropped framings, or contorted body poses, she transforms human figures into striking sculptural forms.

Through its deliberate interplay of saturated colors, textiles, and geometric abstraction, Flamboya actively resists ethnographic voyeurism. The work challenges traditional Western tropes of the "Other," inviting multiple interpretations while offering a powerful meditation on the limitations of sight, knowledge, and power in the history of photography.

Roxane (2012) operates as an intimate visual journal documenting the evolving relationship between the photographer and her muse, Roxane Danset. Created over several years, the book diverges from traditional portraiture to explore the collaborative, performative dynamic between the two women. Rather than a straightforward documentary project, it functions as a fluid exchange of ideas, where Roxane's body serves as a malleable conduit for Sassen’s directorial vision. This ongoing dialogue strips away standard fashion narratives, presenting a highly personal exploration of the creative process, trust, and the shifting boundaries between observer and subject.

Aesthetically, the publication distills Sassen’s signature visual vocabulary into a concentrated, interior space. The images rely on stark lighting, abrupt cropping, and unexpected poses to transform the human figure into a series of graphic, sculptural shapes. By obscuring facial features and focusing on the geometry of limbs, fabric, and bold swaths of color, Sassen creates structural ambiguity. The rigorous sequence of these abstracted forms forces the viewer to engage with the body not merely as a representation of an individual, but as a deliberate formalist puzzle, balancing bold aesthetic choices with diaristic intimacy.

Parasomnia operates as a surreal investigation into the subconscious and the complexities of her own displacement. Shot across West and East Africa, the project draws its title from the sleep disorder characterized by abnormal movements and dreams, blurring the boundaries between waking reality and the nocturnal imagination. Having spent her formative childhood years in Kenya, Sassen treats the landscape not as a traditional documentary subject, but as a psychological mirror. The work navigates her enduring sense of being both an insider and a permanent outsider, utilizing the continent as a vivid, enigmatic backdrop for exploring the fluid nature of memory, identity, and the subconscious.

Parasomnia occupies a pivotal position in her career, marking her definitive transition from fashion photography and localized art projects into globally recognized contemporary art photobooks. Published by Prestel shortly after her breakout publication Flamboya (2008), Parasomnia deepened and formalized the visual vocabulary that would come to define her mature oeuvre.

The book relies on Sassen’s signature disruption of the human form and her masterful command of high-contrast color. She continually obscures the faces and identities of her subjects through harsh, directional light, allowing deep, inky shadows to swallow physical details. This aggressive approach strips away traditional portraiture, transforming bodies and limbs into striking, anonymous geometric shapes that merge with the surrounding environment. By injecting sculptural props and performative, unnatural poses into everyday settings, she creates a visual syntax that constantly oscillates between intimate observation and highly staged, abstract theater.

Umbra (2014) stands as S most concentrated meditation on the structural and psychological properties of the shadow. Moving beyond her earlier work where shadows merely obscured identity, this book treats darkness as an active, physical presence. The resulting compositions are high-contrast graphic puzzles that push her signature aesthetic to its most abstract and formalist extremes

In and Out of Fashion (2013) is a crucial volume that maps the intersection of S commercial assignments and her independent artistic vision. The publication highlights how her spontaneous, experimental approach to fashion photography functioned as a creative laboratory. By routinely cropping limbs or turning models into amorphous tangles, she demonstrated how the fashion domain afforded her the freedom to conduct rigorous modernist research into form

Viviane Sassen’s Folio serves as a recovery of the artist’s own genesis, gathering photographs taken in the mid-1990s during her formative years following art school. Operating as a coming-of-age narrative, the work documents the raw vulnerability of youth, exploring the scarred and transitioning bodies of herself and her friends. Thematically, it establishes Sassen's early preoccupation with physical trauma and the complex ambiguity of desire. Originally conceived in the pre-digital era as a handmade Xeroxed dummy book, the project remained unpublished for decades until its recent realization. It stands not as a retrospective gloss, but as a faithful translation of her original, unresolved explorations of the physical self.  

The book reveals the raw, unpolished origins of Sassen’s visual language. Shot on small-format analog snapshot cameras, the images are defined by heavy grain and an immediate, diaristic intimacy. Even in these early experiments, her tendency to treat the human body as a malleable sculptural form is highly evident. By isolating fragmented limbs, hands, and scarred tissue through abrupt cropping and unconventional angles, she strips away traditional portraiture in favor of abstract geometry. This structural approach forces a visceral viewing experience, a push and pull between attraction and discomfort, that would become the defining hallmark of her later practice.  

Viviane Sassen and Emmeline de Mooij’s collaborative publication Frau Holle serves as a  meditation on female transformation, aging, and the reclamation of visibility. Taking its title from a central European pagan folkloric figure, the book subverts traditional fashion and portraiture narratives to explore the messy realities of the physical body, motherhood, and desire. Reconnecting decades after their initial photographic collaborations, the artists challenge conventional ideas of palatable beauty by embracing what they describe as the "monstrous". This conceptual framework refutes the erasure of older women, presenting instead a surreal, unapologetic celebration of womanhood and creative power grounded in the natural landscape.  

Aesthetically, the book relies on Sassen’s signature disruption of the physical form combined with de Mooij's sculptural interventions. By integrating textiles, performative gestures, and abstract props into natural environments, the photographs blur the line between documentary observation and staged theater. The compositions frequently utilize deep, graphic shadows and obscured faces to strip away individual identity, transforming the subjects into abstract, formal shapes. This approach forces the viewer to engage with the body as a structural element rather than a traditional portrait, translating the ephemeral act of collaborative play into a highly structured visual puzzle.

The book is stamped by Sassen with number 15/50.

Same ISBN for all 4 books in the set.

Same ISBN as Lexicon?

For this artist book, Viviane Sassen collaborates with legendary book designer Irma Boom to offer a fresh and radical vision of the Palace of Versailles.

A storied site of history, opulence, and political power, France's Palace of Versailles has long captured the imagination of both the public and many acclaimed photographers. In 2018, Viviane Sassen was invited by Versailles to make a series of photographs throughout its vast grounds. For six months, she was given free rein, often after official hours, when the buildings were empty, to wander and photograph the palace's extravagant gardens, gilded baroque interiors, and even Marie Antoinette's private correspondence.Venus & Mercury is Versailles as you've never seen the storied locale before. Drawn to the bodies represented in the palace's many marble statues, Sassen created hybrid forms that play with notions of sexuality and gender and call to mind traditions of Surrealist art and the work of figures such as Hans Bellmer. The book, featuring more than one hundred images, brims with Sassen's surprising, pigment-splashed photomontages that play with vivid color and abstracted forms ' and a group of women, born and raised in the town beyond the palace walls, appears throughout the book, modern-day protagonists photographed within grand palatial chambers.A series of poems by Marjolijn van Heemstra, commissioned by Sassen, allude to histories of intrigue in court society. Conceived and designed by iconic bookmaker Irma Boom, Venus & Mercury is a unique art object with a double-gatefold cover, packaged in a custom-made box, each individually painted by Sassen.

Ten signed photographic prints affixed loosely in the book.