THE FORTUNE TELLER Colin Dodgson
IN AND OUT OF FASHION VIVIANE SASSEEN
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In and Out of Fashion Viviane Sassen
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GALLERY Fashion
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BOSE Headphones
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THE FORTUNE TELLER Colin Dodgson
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In and Out of Fashion 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.
Photographs by Viviane Sassen
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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 of Viviane 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’.
5 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 Journey,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.
free from the fashion world’s prevailing codes and conventions.
A world of independent creativity 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 generally arise in the course of an unobstructed creative flow is particularly clear in this second category, in which the exciting, experimental, creative, modern The exhibition also includes images character of contemporary fashion can from the now iconic series she made for be found. This is where Sassen’s idiom the magazine Kutt in 2002, an ironic can develop unhindered. Here Sassen comment on an advertising campaign can carry out a modernist research into Sassen had shot for the Italian fashion form that has much in common with the house Miu Miu the previous year. The formal experiments of cubism, surrealism models’ bodies are so intertwined that it and minimalism. Sassen can blithely cut is almost impossible to say what belongs out her models’ limbs and have them fly where. According to De Mooij they away into the background, add areas of had worked “in a sort of dream world”, color to her images to stimulate the viewworking by free association. Sassen has er’s imagination, or rotate her pictures to remained strongly attached to this spon- free them from the constraints of gravity. taneity, and her work is correspondingly
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10 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.
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MUSIC IS THE WEAPON
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THE FORTUNE TELLER
Nathalie Kay “Tippi” Hedren—celebrated for her work with director Alfred Hitchcock—appears in the new timepieces and jewelry campaign.
Channeling an otherworldly spirit, the campaign directed by Colin Dodgson tells the story of a fortuneteller—Tippi Hedren—visited by girls and guys wearing richly decorated pieces from the new collections. Amongst gilded gold chairs, silk table cloths, crystals and candles, Tippi Hedren holds the attention of her young visitors as she practices the arts of palmistry and crystal ball reading. The camera focuses on ornate pieces from the collections including the Gucci Ouroboros, GG Running and Le Marché des Merveilles fine jewelry lines as well as the G-Frame and G-Timeless new watches.
Creative Director: Alessandro Michele Art Director: Christopher Simmonds Photographer and Director: Colin Dodgson Music: Intro Written by Emma Davies Performed by E.M.M.A
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