The big picture: Viviane Sassen turns her lens on herself
The Dutch photographer’s self-portrait in a bathroom mirror reflects her fascination with the strangeness and eroticism of the body
Tim Adams
Sunday 22 October 2023
he 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.”