Review: “Flamboya” by Viviane Sassen

Viviane Sassen’s Flamboya brings together photographs from her recent visits to Africa. Though predominantly raised in the Netherlands, from the ages of two to five Sassen lived in a Kenyan village with her father, a doctor who worked at a neighboring polio clinic. The memories from the photographer’s early childhood are, as Edo Dijksterhuis describes in the book’s essay, “tinged with black.” In 2001 at the age of 29, Sassen returned to Africa with a camera and began taking the gestural pictures that reflect her complex and loving relationship to the place. For some, her photographs may call to mind the work of Araki, Nan Goldin or even Wolfgang Tillmans, and yet Sassen has a way of seeing that remains her own.

spread from Flamboya, 2009
© Viviane Sassen / Contrasto

spread from Flamboya, 2009
© Viviane Sassen / Contrasto

Flamboya includes primarily portraits that Sassen made collaboratively with her subjects, some spontaneous and others performative. Red clay, fabrics, concrete and the ocean provide the surreal backdrops to her collection of images. The portraits are unusual in that they emphasize the contours of the body, its movement, physicality and skin, rather than the facial features of the subjects, which are often obscured by harsh shadow or paint. The shadow and the paint, which appear throughout the book, seem to reference Sassen’s symbolic experience or memory of the ethnic ‘Other’ - more certainly, it continually provokes questions in the viewer.

The format of the book is atypical in its playful utilization of smaller pages, which aid to construct the intricate relationships between the sequenced images. These pages also make certain photographs feel secretive or hidden until they are unveiled by the reader, perhaps a considered parallel to the notion of the shadow in her photographs.

spread from Flamboya, 2009
© Viviane Sassen / Contrasto

Though a recent discovery, I’ve returned to Flamboya many times already for its recurring beauty and mystery - likely a book that I will not forget to open again.

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Originally published in Photo-eye Magazine, December 18, 2009.
Flamboya can be purchased here.

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Review: “Flamboya” by Viviane Sassen