Published by Prestel in 2015, Viviane Sassen’s Umbra gives sustained form to a subject that recurs throughout her photography: the shadow. Across 196 pages and approximately 200 color illustrations, shadow is not treated simply as an optical effect. It becomes both image and idea—a means of approaching anxiety and desire, memory and futurity, imagination and illusion.
Sassen’s method depends on keeping representation unsettled. Bodies, objects, and spaces remain recognizable, yet forceful lighting, saturated color, close cropping, and interventions upon the photographic print draw them toward abstraction. A shadow may describe physical volume, conceal information, or appear to detach itself from the scene that produced it. These shifts prevent the photographs from settling into a single symbolic reading; darkness can register as absence in one image and as an active, almost material presence in the next.
The book’s significance lies in the concentration it brings to this vocabulary. Rather than presenting shadow as one formal device among many, Umbra organizes a substantial sequence around its changing psychological and pictorial functions. The movement between realism and abstraction is therefore not an incidental stylistic trait but the structure of the work: visible facts repeatedly give way to projection, association, and doubt. Sassen has described the publication as a collaboration with Irma Boom, an important context for a project in which the passage from exhibition concept to book form is central.
For a serious photobook collection, Umbra merits attention as a focused statement on one of Sassen’s defining concerns. Its interest resides not in documentary completeness but in the disciplined variation of a limited motif. Viewed page by page, the photographs show how light, color, framing, and surface intervention can turn shadow into subject, metaphor, and organizing principle—making the volume a useful study of how photographic meaning can be constructed through sequencing as much as through the individual image.
