The aesthetic vocabulary of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen recalls documentary and staged photography, relying on a visual economy that invites the formulation of multiple interpretations. Her highly distinctive style reflects an innovative and dynamic approach to the medium, producing images with an expressive use of color and tone, unusual viewpoints and sculptural concern with form and shape that often give her compositions a surreal quality. Sassen's photographs constantly disrupt our usual perceptions; while some are carefully constructed, others are scenes she encountered on her travels, leaving us unable to easily distinguish between imaginary fictions and scenes from life.
Much of Sassen's work has been informed by early memories of life in Kenya, where she spent three years as a child. When her family returned to the Netherlands, Sassen was troubled: "I didn't feel like I belonged in Europe, and yet I knew I was a foreigner in Africa," she says. Far from being political or conceptual, she was drawn by an intuitive experience of reality -- her childhood in Africa, her vivid memories and the complexity caused by confrontations between the two cultures -- to create photographs that are neither exoticizing nor straightforward reportage
Sassen is lauded for her ability to seamlessly bridge the divide between fine art and fashion photography. Her experimental approaches to the medium extend to her commercial work in which she uses mirrors, scissors, paint and Photoshop to subvert the viewer's preconceptions about what a fashion photograph is. Of these two strands of her practice, Sassen has remarked, "I've never seen myself as a fashion photographer or considered myself to be an artist. I'm neither one nor the other, which is actually a very comfortable place to be."
Lecture: November 2nd, 2016, 7 P.M. Timbken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts, 111 Eighth Street San Francisco, Ca 94107
