INDEX IN AND OUT OF FASHION VIVIANE SASSEN
PAGE....4-9
-THE EARLY WORK PAGE....6 -A WORLD OF INDIPENDENT CREATIVITY
PAGE....7
-BODY AND WORK PAGE....8
IN A CHILD’S WORLD, A SKUNK, PAGE...12-13 A FROG OR AN OWL, CAN BE A BESTFRIEND.
Award-winning Dutch artist and fashion photographer, Viviane Sassen, has injected new energy and a sense of everyday celebration into the field. Listen to an exclusive 5- minute interview on LensCulture. In the Netherlands and abroad, Viviane Sassen is known foremost as an artist, whose somewhat surreal, colorful photographs of Africa won her the Prix de Rome in 2007. Alongside her independent work, however, she has long worked as a fashion photographer. Her fashion work is held in high regard, and she has carved out her
own unmistakable style. Huis Marseille is exhibiting a retrospective of her fashion oeuvre over the last 17 years. The retrospective shows images built up like paintings or collages, and which arise in free association and creativity. These are not generally prominent aspects in the cautious climate of today’s largely commercially driven fashion photography, but they are typical ofViv-
iane Sassen’s fashion photography. Over the last 17 years, Sassen has developed a personal language that is sometimes surreal – with intertwined bodies, sculptural compositions and abstract forms – and on occasion perhaps bewildering, but it is always fascinating and full of energy.Both innovative strength and a surrealistic beauty mark Sassen’s fashion photography.
In contrast to her renowned independent work, Sassen’s fashion photography is commissioned work that is created in close collaboration with a team of stylists, art directors, models and make-up artists. This means Sassen can treat fashion photography as the ultimate playground; somewhere she can work quickly and intuitively while enjoying the additional benefits of having a professional team on hand to facilitate her experiments. She calls this her ‘Laboratory’.
THE EARLY WORK Viviane Sassen’s fashion photography idiom developed from 2000 onwards partly in close and experimental collaboration with Emmeline de Mooij, with whom she produced photographic series for magazines such as Purple, Re-Magazine and Dazed & Confused.The exhibition in Huis Marseille includes the series Nudes. A Jouney, which includes early nude photos by Sassen and De Mooij that were based on simple ideas that had strange and surprising effects. Bodies became part of a sculptural investigation, were linked to extensions in the form of objects and clothing, and were turned into an amorphous tangle. The exhibition also includes images from the now iconic series she made for the magazine Kutt in 2002, an ironic comment on an advertising campaign
ingly free from the fashSassen had shot for the ion world’s prevailing Italian fashion house codes and conventions. Miu Miu the previous year. The models’ bodies are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to say what belongs where. According to De Mooij they had worked “in a sort of dream world”, working by free association. Sassen has remained strongly attached to this spontaneity, and her work is correspond-
A WORLD OF INDIPENDENT CREATIVIT Y
The Huis Marseille exhibition will be showing a selection of more than 300 photos taken from advertising campaigns created for Carven, M-Missoni, Stella McCartney/Adidas and Levi’s, and from editorials for magazines such as Pop, Wallpaper, Numéro, AnOther Magazine, Purple, and Dazed & Confused, projected in a special way. The fact that Sassen’s fashion images gen-
erally arise in the course of an unobstructed creative flow is particularly clear in this second category, in which the exciting, experimental, creative, modern character of contemporary fashion can be found. This is where Sassen’s idiom can develop unhindered. Here Sassen can carry out a modernist research into form that has much in common with the formal experiments of cubism, surre-
alism and minimalism. Sassen can blithely cut out her models’ limbs and have them fly away into the background, add areas of color to her images to stimulate the viewer’s imagination, or rotate her pictures to free them from the constraints of gravity. The exhibition also contains a section called Foreplay, with images she makes just before or right after a shoot, revealing the serendipities of the photographic process. This series forms perhaps the most intriguing new genre in Viviane Sassen’s oeuvre, with images marked by an extraordinarily beautiful abstraction.
BODY AND FORM Sassen works with natural resources like bright sunlight, shadows, mirrors and reflection, but her images are also constructed using colors, forms and textures, in a kind of joint alchemy with stylists and models. The exhibition shows many beautiful examples of this, including her collaboration with Dutch top model Anna de Rijk, and a special series 36 portraits of the French stylist Roxane Danset, which is being exhibited at Huis Marseille in its entirety. Having started as a kind of performance, with Danset as a “white Grace Jones, obviously without the singing”, this exercise
led to strange and unexpected forms that Danset herself describes as “creature-esque”. Viviane Sassen’s spontaneous, non-commercial, and characteristically individual approach has ensured that her fashion photography goes far beyond the usual confines of this medium. The fashion domain affords her the space to carry out experiments that generate a reservoir of material with which to develop the language of her independent work. The exhibition also furnishes convincing proof that Sassen is developing a visual vocabulary for the fashion photography of the future.
Features 50-meter water resistance 24-hour indicator Chronograph Heavy-duty design
Specifications Case / bezel material: Stainless steel Resin Band Mineral Glass Screw Lock Back 50-meter water resistance
In a child’s world, any pet a skunk, a frog or an owl, can be a best friend. This is the premise for the new Gucci Pre-Fall 2020 campaign shot by Alasdair McLellan with creative direction by Alessandro Michele. Animals and a childlike imagination are recurring motifs of Alessandro Michele’s collections. These themes are conveyed in a series of portraiture vignettes depicting the beauty and the personalities of a group of men, women and their beloved animals. Deers, fawns, owls, blue birds, skunks, squirrels, frogs, hedgehogs, ducks and rabbits are featured across the images: spirit animals dialoguing with the subjects in ways that recall classic allegories and cartoons. With its call to nature, the campaign is ulti-
mately an invitation to enjoy the simple things in life. Sometimes, it just takes very little, or a burst of imagination, to find some balance.
C H R O M A