Above: Viviane Sassen, ‘Untitled’ 2011. Courtesy the artist and The Photographer’s Gallery, London

Like the fleeting patterns and shapes that confront us in a closed-eye hallucination, Viviane Sassen’s photographs challenge, stimulate, confuse. Her wielding of colour and trickery of form have set her apart as a fashion photographer across a two decade long career, yet her singular vision has largely been ignored as that of an artist. It’s a fact The Photographers’ Gallery in London is confronting with a major new exhibition of the most prolific works of her career. As curator Anna Dannemann suggests, it’s a show that will tease the open eye as heavily its content will lingers with lids closed.

Tempe Nakiska: Obviously Viviane Sassen is widely known in the fashion world as a fashion photographer, but her images sit at the line between fashion and art. How would you describe her work as an artist?
Anna Dannemann: Viviane deploys innovative visual strategies – unusual viewpoints, geometrical forms and playful compositions – creating images that subvert the limits and conventions of fashion photography. Elaborate layering of bodies, textures, backgrounds and colours constitute her distinct language, with models’ limbs removed, merged and transformed into two-dimensional patterns. Through this exuberant formalism in which figurative and abstract concerns remain in constant dialogue, her subjects dither between being read as physical and graphic shapes.  Mirrors, shadows, flat blocks of dense colour and false walls further dissect the photographed bodies and confuse our sense of gravity – both within her compositions and the shifting projections in the exhibition space.

TN: And you are showing all this through the most major works of Viviane’s career, from a fashion perspective?
AD: We decided to present Sassen’s fashion photography – including award-winning campaigns for Stella McCartney, Adidas, Carven, Bergdorf Goodman, Miu Miu, and M Missoni, along with acclaimed editorial spreads for magazines such as, i-D, Purple, AnOther Magazine, Dazed & Confused and POP. Sassen’s fashion work sits at the interplay of fashion and art, and offers a dynamic contemporary context to the Edward Steichen fashion and portraiture exhibition (work from the 1920s and 30s) that we are showing in our other galleries at the same time.

TN: How closely did you work with the artist on this exhibit?
AD: I worked closely with Sassen and her partner Hugo Timmermans on the conception and design for this immersive installation. It was a challenging process to get all the elements of the presentation working together, which includes two large-scale mirrors, temporary walls, floor vinyl and two projectors. The installation team use advanced software to get the precise alignment of the projected imagery aligned, and the artist adapts the editing of her images (over 350 in this instance) for each new exhibition.

TN: Her work is also quite playful. Is this a large part of what attracts her viewer?
AD: I think her work is very playful, sometimes almost childlike in its curiosity and openness to experimentation with different shapes, textures, colour and shadow. She works very fast and very intuitively, which is also visible in her work. I think this is attractive to a lot of viewers as on the one hand Sassen has an incredibly consistent visual sensibility which, at the same time, never rests or becomes complacent.

TN: There has also often been said a certain feeling of disconnect between Sassen’s move from Africa to Holland as a child. As a curator, what impact would you say this feeling has had on her aesthetic in general, and how is this captured in some of the pieces featured here?
AD: Viviane was six years old when her family relocated to Holland. Her early impressions of Africa may certainly have left a dynamic impression on her reflected in her use of form, colour, light and textures. She uses strong shadows, flat blocks of dense colours that reflect and respond to her experiences in Africa. But she works very intuitively so I think she uses these visual elements without tracing them back to a specific source.

TN: Has the exhibition been a long time in the making?
AD: This exhibition has been planned for some time, we have been great admirers of Sassen’s work reflected in her winning an ICP Infinity Award in 2011, her acclaimed  publication In and Out of Fashion and prominent exhibitions including the premier of her retrospective at Huis Marseilles, Amsterdam, in 2012. We have been hoping to showcase her work in London for many years.

‘Viviane Sassen: Analemma, Fashion Photography 1992 – 2012’ runs until 18th January 2015 at The Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies St, London W1F 7LW