VENUS & Viviane Sassen MERCURY
The Palace of Versailles has been fetishized by photographers since Eugene Atget—“a Balzac of the camera,” in Berenice Abbott’s words—first fixed the crumbling statuary of its gardens in his romantic gaze early in the twentieth century. More recently, Luigi Ghirri created photographic puzzles of the place that shift between fiction and fantasy, Candida Hofer explored its social architecture, and Robert Polidori captured its epic decorative constructs. For her most recent work, Viviane Sassen has applied her distinctive visual style to the storied location.
Versailles, as imagined
