Viviane Sassen

Viviane Sassen is one of today's most innovative photographers and this stunning book looks back at a decade of her work, including new collages and previously unpublished photographs. This mid-career retrospective volume focuses on Viviane Sassen's fine art photography, revealing a surrealist undercurrent in her work. Sassen recognizes Surrealism as one of her earliest artistic influences, seen in the uncanny shadows, fragmented bodies, and otherworldly landscapes she captures in her work. In addition to images from the acclaimed series "Umbra," this volume draws from the series "Flamboya," in which she returned to Kenya, "Parasomnia," a dreamlike exploration of sleep, the "Roxane" series, a mutual portrait created with her muse, Roxane Danset, "Of Lotus and Mud," a study of procreation and fecundity, and "Pikin Slee," a journey to a remote village in Suriname. This book features a contextualizing essay and an insightful interview with the artist. Throughout, Sassen emerges as a poetic photographer obsessed with light and shadow and a brilliant technician, who is a master of both vibrant color and muted hues. Selected by Sassen herself from across the last ten years, the images draw on the surrealist strategies of collage and unexpected juxtapositions to give a survey of her practice.

Bringing together seventeen years of work in the fashion world, this eye-catching volume features selections from Sassen's award-winning series and campaigns for fashion designers and magazines. It includes essays that offer a context for Sassen's work in the history of fashion photography as well as a bibliography of nearly all her fashion series.

The flamboya is a tropical, bright, colorful flower. Viviane Sassen used these colors for her African pictures.

Known for her unique approach to fashion photography, Viviane Sassen has taken yet another stylistic detour in her latest collection, which focuese on the inhabitants of a remote village on the Upper Suriname River. Sassen's lens captures the natural beauty of the very traditional way of living, where mundane objects can appear extraordinary against the background of nature's overwhelming presence.

Saturated with color and boldly composed, Viviane Sassen's photographs straddle the boundaries of fashion, art, and documentary photography. This monograph by the award-winning Dutch-born photographer Viviane Sassen features photographs from throughout West and East Africa. Sassen's overriding theme is parasomnia, a sleep disorder involving strange movements, behaviors, emotions, and dreams. The otherworldly feel of these photographs, involving both human and inanimate subjects, aptly conveys an altered-consciousness point of view-one that is at home in the pages of a fashion magazine, newspaper, or a modern art gallery. Indeed, Sassen's images have appeared in all three venues to wide acclaim. Sassen's photographic series is engaging and thrillingly beautiful, filled with shadow and ambiguity, and it offers a challenge to the viewers to come up with their own narrative.

This highly collectible, limited-edition pop-up book is a work of art in itself, rendering Daniel Gordon's sculptural forms into a new layer of materiality and animating them in a pop-up performance. The book consists of six works in pop-up form, some featuring simple plants, others unfolding more elaborate tableaux. Inspired by his interest in the popularity of certain subjects on the internet--houseplants among them--Gordon meticulously cuts up pictures found online to create sculptural and fantastical still lifes. He uses photography not to show reality, but to present a new version of it. The crumpled paper and mix of realistic and unnatural colors render the objects slightly goofy. "Without seams and faults and limitations, my project would be very different," Gordon says. "The seamlessness of the ether is boring to me, but the materialization of that ether, I think, can be very interesting." His pieces are a perfect marriage of digital and analog processes and of high and low artistic references, complicating what is understood as sculpture, photography, painting, and the cutout.

A feminist-inflected investigation of color and image-driven consumer culture, Glass Life brings together Sara Cwynar's multilayered portraits and stills from the films Soft Film (2016), Rose Gold (2017), and Red Film (2018). Cwynar's research-driven and visually complex images constitute the hallmarks of contemporary post-Pictures Generation work--in which photography is pursued in relation to film, sculpture, digital culture, and the cultural and technological history of image-making. Cwynar's work revolves around her interest in subjective notions of beauty through images; the fetishization of consumer objects and colors; and the exploration of the informal image archives that have emerged around the industrialization and capitalization of these ideas. As part of her core practice, Cwynar collects, arranges, and archives her eBay purchases and creates studio studies of these consumer objects, exploring how images circulate online and how the lives and purposes of both physical objects and their likenesses change over time. Sara Cwynar: Glass Life is a must-have sourcebook for understanding the multilayered practice of this celebrated, multidisciplinary artist.