VIVIANE SASSEN — PHOSPHOR: Art & Fashion 1990–2023

This monograph by Viviane Sassen, published by Prestel in 2023, is part of the Darwin Bookshop because it captures three decades of one of the most influential photographic voices in contemporary art and fashion. Drawing no clear line between the two, Phosphor moves between editorial, personal, and experimental modes—fusing fashion commissions with deeply surreal portraiture, performance, and photographic interventions that cut, mask, and double the image.

From the stark monochromes of her 1990s work for Purple to the vivid pigment-saturated bodies and shadows of her later African series, this is Sassen at her most fearless—pushing photographic form through colour fields, hard light, and uncanny gesture. Her women bend backwards over stone or merge into print like hallucinations; reflections multiply in crushed mirrors; colour is never illustrative, but constitutive. Throughout, Sassen reclaims the female image from passive display, letting it become abstract, rhythmic, eruptive.

Not a greatest-hits anthology, but an artist’s archive in flux, Phosphor stages a restless visual language shaped by fashion’s surface and art’s interior demands. Sassen’s work resists the boundary between applied image and conceptual inquiry, dissolving fashion photography into something stranger and more electric.

Technical Sheet

Title: Viviane Sassen — Phosphor: Art & Fashion 1990–2023
Artist / Author: Viviane Sassen
Date: 2023
Technique / Printing Method: Colour and black-and-white photography, mixed media, collage
Medium / Materials: Hardback monograph
Language: English
Pages: 320
Publisher / Editor: Prestel
Condition: New