Sketches: Polaroids made in Africa, 2002-2010

Sketches gathers Polaroids Viviane Sassen made across Africa between 2002 and 2010, a compact counterpart to the more finished photographs of her earlier book Flamboya.

Where Flamboya presents Sassen's formal, color-saturated studio and location work, Sketches shows the instant-film images she made alongside it, offered here without captions or extended text as a self-contained visual record. Designed by Sybren Kuiper and published by Kominek Books, Berlin, the book was conceived less as documentation of a larger project than as a small object with its own internal logic.

Sassen, trained first as a fashion photographer before turning toward a more personal, abstracted body of work, has repeatedly returned to Africa, where she spent part of her childhood, as a recurring subject and site. Sketches sits alongside Flamboya, Parasomnia, and Umbra in a body of work that treats the continent's light and landscape as material for an increasingly formal, painterly photographic language.