The Dutch photographer and artist Viviane Sassen has spoken about her work dramatising her shyness, her anxieties about connecting with the world. In that context, this self-portrait, which prefaces Phosphor, a new book and a large retrospective exhibition of her work, might seem out of character. Not for the exposed body so much as for her eye that gazes at the viewer as she gazes at herself. She took the picture in 1990, when she was 19, studying photography and starting to work as a model – a role that convinced her to follow a vocation on the looking side of the lens. As she once said in an interview with the Observer: “I think that the experience I had of being shot by male photographers shaped what I was attempting to do, to show a different kind of sexuality than that created by the male gaze. One that is more fractured, disjointed. I have always been a very shy exhibitionist. Trying to hide but wanting to show.”
Phosphor features the multiple strategies she has used to explore that contradiction, including masks and mirrors and paint effects and Photoshop. Sassen has worked in fashion, but her photographs have never been the standard issue of the glossies. She has a fascination with the strangeness and eroticism of the body, but rarely with faces. Part of her childhood was spent in Kenya, where her father worked as a doctor, and she has returned to remote places in Africa, and to South America, not so much as a documentarist, but as if to locate the sources of her surrealist take on the world: the child’s eye saturated with colour and troubled by shadow. However far she travels, a good part of her journey is self-discovery – and however abstract her images, they are, she suggests, all really self-portraits. This was only the first of many.
• Phosphor: Art & Fashion 1990-2023 is at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris until 11 February. The accompanying book Phosphor: Mirrors & Portals is published by Prestel (£55)
