Since she graduated from the Royal Academy of Arnhem in 1997, Viviane Sassen (Amsterdam, 1972) has been combining freelance assignments as a fashion photographer for established and underground publications such as I-D, Purple and RE-Magazine with her own artistic work. In 2002 and with increasing frequency during the years that followed, Viviane travelled back and forth between the Netherlands and Africa bringing back images from Zambia, South and East Africa. Throughout the corpus that constitutes both this independent and commissioned work, a dimension appears as prominently topical: Viviane’s concern for the issue of the representation of Otherness – whether it is in terms of gender, ethnicity or physical ability.
Most of the photographs from the series ‘Flamboya’ are portraits – to the extent that one is actually not always able to visualize the facial features of their subjects. These are most often women and children, though some also feature men. In almost all cases their face or at least part of their body is covered by shadows or withdrawn from our sight, the models actually turning their back to the camera. There lay the visual motifs that hint at Viviane’s implicit arguments: the impossibility to capture the identity of an Other in its full complexity and riches.
In 2007 she was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome for her photographic work.