Renowned fashion photographer and artist Viviane Sassen turns her lens to the remote Surinamese jungle village of Pikin Slee. Taken from a new series of work which will debut at Amsterdam's Unseen Photo Fair from September 26 and is set to be published in a new Prestel-published book slated for spring 2014, this meditative yet spontaneous series of black-and-white and color images explores the uncanny and unknowable side to her subjects—and indeed herself. Sassen is famed for reinvigorating the realm of fashion photography with her work for Purple, Dazed & Confused and Acne Paper. Born in Amsterdam, she spent much of her childhood in Kenya; the experience is reflected in her lauded 2011 body of work, Parasomnia, a surreal trip through unidentified African locales that reflects her memories of growing up. Pikin Slee is located on the Upper Suriname River, deep within the rainforest. Its 4,000 inhabitants are mostly members of the Saramacca tribe, ancestors of the Maroons who escaped slavery on the Dutch plantations in the 18th century. Sassen first visited Pikin Slee in the summer of 2012. “You can actually speak Dutch with people who descend from African slaves in the middle of the jungle in South America which is such a weird thing to look at in terms of history,” she says.  “What caught my eye was the very traditional way of living, the beauty of overwhelming nature, and the notion of the strange lines of faith which tied together my own history and theirs, in the form of our mutual connections to Africa and the Netherlands.”