Viviane Sassen - Flamboya - 2010

This book is brand new, was never opened and still shrinkwrapped (open on one side to see the imprint). The images were taken from another copy. Martin Parr's photobook of the decade.
Rome, Contrasto, 2010; 4to (300 x 240 mmm, 11¾ x 9½ in); colour photographs, short story by Moses Isegawa, essay by Edo Dijksterhuis, design by SYB - Sybren Kuiper; photo-illustrated paper-covered boards, strip of binder's adhesive showing through on front pastedown at gutter as usual with this title, a fine copy, scarce as such; [98]pp (many pages are two-thirds in width).

Viviane Sassen was born in Amsterdam but lived in a Kenyan village from the ages of two to five while her father worked at a hospital. Flamboya contains photographs she made in Africa between 2003 and 2006. In a short text accompanying an exhibition featuring this work, she wrote:'Flamboya' refers to the 'Flamboyant' tree which blossoms in December and spatters the landscape across East and South Africa with countless deep red-and-orange flowers. Yet, maybe this name constitutes the sole remaining concession and reference to an exotic image of Africa in the history of a body of work that otherwise helps challenging this enduring conception. Shot in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia, the Flamboya photographs are an attempt to recapture my childhood years in Africa, yet they also pose implicit fundamental questions about image, bias and the constraints of the photographic medium.'
Martin Parr's Best Books of the Decade pp48-9, 88; The Dutch Photobook A Thematic Selection from 1945 onwards pp144-5; The Photobook A History, III p 241.