Published by Note Note Éditions, Folio takes us into the decade that saw Viviane Sassen born as a photographer: the 1990s.
The images of Folio were taken in the mid-1990s, when Viviane Sassen was just turning to photography, after studying fashion. From the start, the Dutch artist imagined this body of work as a book, which she put together herself from photocopies taken from a large Xerox printer. It remained at the project stage… until he met the editors of Note Note, thirty years later, who offered to publish it.
Folio takes us back to a pivotal period for photography, which turned in the 1990s towards a documentation of reality, spontaneous and straightforward, far removed from the glossy images of the previous decade. For Viviane Sassen it’s a breath of fresh air: “In the 80s, everything was glamorous, controlled and distant. And then suddenly, with the rise of instant photography and personalities like Nobuyoshi Araki or Nan Goldin, photography took another turn: it was just about capturing your friends, yourself, your own environment. It was something that, as a young, broke student, I could relate to.’identifier. »
His photographs are part of this aesthetic of spontaneity and intimacy captured in all its rawness. But above all they reveal the already glaring presence of the visual language of the Viviane Sassen that we know today, who likes to explore the geometry of the image through framing and staging. If she photographs those around her or herself, it is mainly in search of formal potential. She does not reveal any face or individuality, preferring to examine the body in all its forms. The latter becomes a material to sculpt. She models him by making him take part in knotty choreographies that she likes to push to the point of the bizarre. The tools of these photographic sculptures? Color, preferably bright, plays of light and shadow, graphic shapes drawn from the elements that surround it: a ray of sunlight highlighting the geometry of an armpit or a white napkin with which an image is transformed in collage.
The layout of Folio is a tribute to this vocabulary. The book is encompassed in a captivating green, which dots the rest of its pages. If it reminds her of nature, this color also takes Viviane Sassen back to her childhood in South Africa and to the hospital where her father worked, dressed in a uniform of the same shade. In response to this green, the photographer plays with white – her remedy for melancholy – just like the pages of the book, whose different sizes create white margins emphasizing the geometry of an image or cutting out another, like a echo of this famous white napkin or this rectangle of paper held at fingertip and reproduced on the cover.
« Young, I was back then, and happy to be older now » writes Viviane Sassen in the penultimate letter of the alphabet book which brings an original conclusion to Folio : a retrospective look in 26 chapters. Thirty years have passed since these images emerged from his box, but is there a difference between this body of work and his contemporary works? Not really. Today, Viviane Sassen perhaps photographs less of those around her and her images no longer have that grain of the 1990s. But her gaze is there, the same that already animated her first attempts as a photographer with so much power.
Viviane Sassen – Folio
Published by NOTE NOTE ÉDITIONS
80 pages
Edition of 1200 copies
Design chez Studio Mathieu Meyer
Available here and in all good bookstores.
The work will be presented at Polycopies alongside other publications from Notes Notes Éditions.
