Published by Oodee in 2017, Viviane Sassen’s Roxane II extends the visual journal she has made with her muse Roxane. It is neither a conventional portrait study nor a neutral record of a model before the camera. Across a changing register of poses and moods, sensuality gives way to tenderness and back again, making the relationship between photographer and subject the book’s central material.

Sassen complicates the familiar division between observer and observed. Her own presence enters the images indirectly: a shadow falls into the frame; pieces of paper carry the imprint of her breasts. Such gestures turn photography into a reciprocal performance. Roxane is not simply depicted, and Sassen does not remain safely outside the picture. Each leaves a mark on the other, until authorship, projection, and self-presentation become difficult to separate.

The title also signals continuity. Following the earlier Roxane project, this second chapter gives duration to a collaboration that might otherwise be read as a discrete sitting or series. Its shifting gallery of attitudes suggests that identity is produced through repetition, play, and response rather than disclosed in a single definitive likeness. Intimacy here is active and negotiated: a condition created by two participants who alternately expose, direct, and answer one another.

This 152-page hardcover was issued as a first edition of 1,000 copies. Those bibliographic facts do not by themselves determine its importance; the stronger reason for collectors to attend to Roxane II is its unusually explicit account of collaboration. Within Sassen’s practice, the book offers a concentrated study of the unstable boundary between photographer and model, while its sustained form allows the mutual portrait to unfold through variation rather than resolution.