FROOM OUR BOOKSHELF
“Hot Mirror” by Vivian Sassen
Hot Mirror is a hypnotic, visceral, at times unsettling book. A journey that doesn’t ask to be linear but disorienting. It’s not an anthology, not a monograph, not a coherent narrative. It’s a symbolic atlas where photographic language implodes and regenerates.
Viviane Sassen moves along boundaries: between art photography and fashion, between autobiography and construction, between instinctive gesture and formal strategy. Her images, carnal, abstract, saturated, jagged, inhabit a constant state of tension, where the female, Black, queer, fragmented or totemic body becomes an active subject. Not represented, but staged as a device.
The title, Hot Mirror, already says a lot: a mirror that doesn’t return a faithful reflection, but distorts. That doesn’t cool, but heats and bends. There is no reflection without transformation and in this very gesture of altered mirroring lies the poetic core of the book.
Sassen’s approach is both visual and conceptual, but never didactic. Working through collage, double exposures, intense colors, and abstract interventions, she disrupts photographic transparency to open cracks where the symbolic, the corporeal, and the mythical coexist. The image becomes ambiguous, layered, at times erotic, at times uncomfortable, and precisely for this reason, capable of generating thought.
Hot Mirror is a book that challenges domesticated vision. That forces us to dwell in doubt, ambiguity, imperfect beauty. It’s an object we return to in the studio whenever we need to remember that an image is a language, but also an enigma. We recommend it because Hot Mirror is not just a book of images, but a tool for visual misalignment. It becomes essential whenever visual language feels too self-assured, too smooth, too compliant. Sassen reminds us that photography doesn’t always have to clarify, reassure, or explain. It can disturb, withhold, derail the gaze.
For those who work with images, like we do, this is a necessary book. Not to inspire style, but to awaken attention. To remind us that the act of seeing can still be a site of friction and that often, meaning is born precisely from that friction. Many of the works in Hot Mirror take shape as autobiographical fragments or visual dreams. The African continent, especially Ethiopia, returns as a landscape of the soul: a place of origin and friction, real and projected. But every reference is transfigured: there is no exoticism, no realism. There is another kind of vision.
In this book, photography becomes ritual, unconscious elaboration, psychic gesture. The body is the eye, fashion becomes sculpture, dream becomes document. It’s no longer about “seeing,” but about unlearning how we were taught to see. Photography ceases to be a tool for reading the world and becomes one for deconstructing and imagining a new one.
