<h1 class="centre">At the threshold of the passage of time, when the world still has vertigo from pirouetting on its axis, in the liminality of a lucid dream and the suspension of temporality, Sarah Moon builds her visual landscape.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Time is a thief that steals away the endurance of the anecdote, and Moon lets it. She watches it crawl into a room in the dead of night, pack a bag of belongings not its own, and creep through the cracks of the continuum. She hardly makes any attempt to arrest its movement and imprison it behind closed fists or frozen frames. Her attention seems to be more directed at ensuring time treads through the territory of her image, leaving the evidence of its presence in a blurred gesture, a rogue fingerprint, decaying daylight.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Sarah Moon annihilates reality. Or renders it otherworldly. A withdrawal from its rigours and relentlessness in her pictorial depictions make her subjects ever an enigma, who exist in a state of constant metamorphosis. Much like Moon herself.</h1>
<h1 class="right">Her private life is one that leaves many gaps to fill, and sentences unfinished, in the public eye. In many ways, the uncertainty of it all is not far removed from her artistry. What we do know of Moon, however, is that she was born in 1941 in Vernon, a part of occupied France. Later in Paris, she began her career as a model to sustain herself. The young model often moved behind the camera, ever armed with a trusty Nikon, transitioning from the subject of an image to its maker, photographing fellow models and friends. </h1>
<h1 class="right">Her foray into fashion photography first occurred when she was asked to replace an absent photographer at short notice in a shoot for the magazine L’Express. Fame wasted no time in following suit. It wrapped itself around Moon and watched as Vogue devoted a full page to the newcomer in 1969 that drew an image of her as “Former cover girl. Photography to laugh at other models. From portrait to reel, from film to needle, she has thus gone from amateur category to that of a professional, in one year.”</h1>
<h1 class="centre">By now, Moon had already signed her first campaign for Cacharel for its spring 1968 collection. Her images lined the walls of Paris and invited people into the inner worlds of the women inhabiting them; all the while Moon wasn’t even — by the very definition of the term and whatever integrity education or experience may lend — a ‘photographer’ yet. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">From the year 1970, which marked her move into fashion photography as an image-maker to reckon with, Moon’s career lay before her in submission, with a willingness to circumvent the established conventions of time, a diversion so deeply personal that it hardly sought to curate any defined statement. “Instead, I am expressing something, an echo of the world maybe,” she said.</h1>
<h1 class="left">An echo of the world is indeed the protagonist of the pure fiction she creates in her photographic work. Gaze into Moon’s imagery long enough, and you find yourself moved to sail off on an adventure to unravel the lore of its blur or its grain. </h1>
<h1 class="left"> What makes the woman in the frame, almost as if it were on a whim, half-turn her back to the photographer? What makes another tear through the containment of its paper-prison with haunted doe-eyes? What could Moon have possibly whispered to a model that forms a half-smile of parted lips before the illusory makes its sweet escape? While these are questions a viewer grapples with, Moon is hardly preoccupied with manipulating the destinies of those whose creator she becomes in her own visual world. </h1>
<h1 class="left"> She watches them unfold from a distance, her lens interfering only now and then, lest the evanescence of beauty be so fleeting that it is destroyed in its own waking state.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Her early work and eventual twenty-year-long collaboration with Cacharel is a testament to this very practice. At a time when her male contemporaries had templatized the overt sexual dimension of the female form in fashion photography, Sarah Moon changed the codes of fashion photography, with heroines that reside in an alternate universe where they attain an autonomy of existence with a lack of urgency, and through the act of waiting.</h1>
<h1 class="right">Her models lounge near a window or sit by the dresser; rosy-mouthed, dark-eyed, austere-faced, lace-trimmed nightgown and all, in unabashed pursuit of leisure and its tiny mutiny against guilt. Leisure that often evades a woman. A soft cry erupts from the throat, a finger is traced with tenderness along the length of each passing hour, a fold in the fabric owes itself to girlhood adventurism — Sarah Moon composes the suspense of each gesture, suggesting the happenstance but never fully revealing its occurrence.</h1>
<h1 class="right">The clothes exhibited are accessory to the story of escapism of those wearing them as Moon plunges a knife into the heart of lived experience and extracts only those imaginations that are almost-lost, not etched in solidified memory. Experimentation, from colour to technique, from movement to light, forms the core of her art. Her images from those years are in slightly sepia tones, a chromatic exploration she lets go of over the years as she doesn’t “like magenta anymore”, in favour of her beloved black and white, and sometimes, deep, saturated colour.</h1>
<h1 class="left">At this point, Moon had shot to a kind of stardom. Working closely with Barbara Hulanicki of Biba, the trailblazing London clothing store, Moon became almost an in-house photographer for the boutique’s decadent, Art Deco-inspired campaigns. She was part of a small group of photographers who determined and shaped the visual landscape of a fashionable London post the Swinging Sixties. In 1972, she photographed the Pirelli calendar, becoming the first woman to do so. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">The calendar, with its long history of provocative imagery, picturing models in the nude, all shapely breasts and water droplets dotting limbs, was reimagined the year Sarah Moon shot her dainty women with kohl-smudged eyes in archaic underwear.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Even when bare flesh peaks through, the sensuality elicited by Moon’s models escapes the voyeurism of roving eyes, for she views them as her equal. In the 1980s, with Commes des Garçons and the arrival of Japanese designers on the Parisienne scene, Sarah Moon shifted her focus from the fiction of her compositions to the fashion of the clothing. In working with Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto, she assessed how the clothing needed to be shot in full length to draw attention to its structure, the shifting and the static.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Her silhouettes stood in contrast to simple backdrops, the garments constructing the architecture of the image. Faces were ingested in their entirety by shadow or light, and concealed behind hands or hats.</h1>
<h1 class="right">Fashion never left Moon, it formed the focal point of her practice, to which all other paths returned. In addition to the complete oeuvre of her fashion photography, she is ever deepening her personal practice to extend it to situations that stir the human collective consciousness, objects that appear as refugees from death and finally, stories of childhood fascinations in her filmography. Remember, Moon’s life is a metamorphosis of its own making.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">The year 1985 marked a turning point in her career, caused by the shock of the death of her assistant Mike Yavel and the departure of Corrine Sarrut from Cacharel. From this intense life event arose the question of finding a new space for expression and bathing in the freedom of solitary practice. She draws no boundaries between her early work and later explorations — themes, motifs and techniques bleeding into one another, making it more difficult for a person to assign a category to the kind of artist Moon is. In her images unfold a play of superimpositions, duplications, under-exposures and fabrications. Traces of decomposition on a polaroid are telling of time, and Moon likes that “the threat is already included in the framework.”</h1>
<h1 class="left">She lies in wait, looking for a coincidence between chance and desire, outside and inside, sun and moon, fleeting time and memory, with a gaze entirely reminiscent of childhood wonderment. Of the fear, the disgust, the virtue that appears as seemingly colossal emotions of a child, enough to crack the core of the earth open, which slowly wear away and lose magnitude when the head and the heart become jaded by norms and know-how.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Echoing the tales of the Brothers Grimm, the origin of cinema, from L’Aurore by F.W. Murnau to The Night of the Hunter by Charles Laughton, Moon’s defined chiaroscuro brought out in black and white, the colourscape that she thinks in, capturing the basest fascinations of childhood aided by the refinement of an artist.</h1>
<h1 class="left">Entering Moon’s visual universe is nothing short of entering a labyrinth of light and dark. The sky never bursts with blue. Rain is always lightly falling on the world. Cobblestones appear greyer than usual. A black bird of omen screeches across the page. Smoke is dishevelled from chimney-necks. Twin legs in stockings bury themselves in grass blades, reaching but never touching a lotus bed. A gaping mouth melts into sludge. In the gradients and layers of Moon’s black and white, there resides a grey concealed. In this grey sits a mirror to our inner worlds, and Sarah Moon, a ‘sovereign of shadows’, beckons with soft fingertips and guides us into it. She shows us where to look to see ourselves.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">In her cinema of successive still images, the heaving anxieties of childhood are evoked in search of an eternal world, one where time abandons all linearity and notions of speed to dwindle back and forth until it knots into itself. Her films, inspired by the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault, like Moon’s Little Black Riding Hood, let the viewer into the dark, dissenting from the erupting colour in which such tales are typically envisioned. Yet, somehow, her filmography retains the rolling vastness of imagination and freedoms as seen by a child.</h1>
<h1 class="right">In her lengthy career, Sarah Moon has seen her work exhibited in galleries and museums around the world and published in many books — among the most important are Coincidences, Circus, The Red Thread, 1,2,3,4,5, which was awarded the Prix Nadar in 2008 and PastPresent in 2020. She has directed several films, including a feature film Mississippi One (1991), and photographed as many images as would last a lifetime. Moon has traversed through time to remain what can be best called an icon through it all.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">One can attempt to contain her life in perfectly executed photographs or crunch it into world-limit contortions, but the fact remains:</h1>
<h1 class="centre">A portrait of Sarah Moon will forever be the portrait of an enigma.</h1>
<h1 class="full">At the threshold of the passage of time, when the world still has vertigo from pirouetting on its axis, in the liminality of a lucid dream and the suspension of temporality, Sarah Moon builds her visual landscape.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Time is a thief that steals away the endurance of the anecdote, and Moon lets it. She watches it crawl into a room in the dead of night, pack a bag of belongings not its own, and creep through the cracks of the continuum. She hardly makes any attempt to arrest its movement and imprison it behind closed fists or frozen frames. Her attention seems to be more directed at ensuring time treads through the territory of her image, leaving the evidence of its presence in a blurred gesture, a rogue fingerprint, decaying daylight.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Sarah Moon annihilates reality. Or renders it otherworldly. A withdrawal from its rigours and relentlessness in her pictorial depictions make her subjects ever an enigma, who exist in a state of constant metamorphosis. Much like Moon herself.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Her private life is one that leaves many gaps to fill, and sentences unfinished, in the public eye. In many ways, the uncertainty of it all is not far removed from her artistry. What we do know of Moon, however, is that she was born in 1941 in Vernon, a part of occupied France. Later in Paris, she began her career as a model to sustain herself. The young model often moved behind the camera, ever armed with a trusty Nikon, transitioning from the subject of an image to its maker, photographing fellow models and friends. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Her foray into fashion photography first occurred when she was asked to replace an absent photographer at short notice in a shoot for the magazine L’Express. Fame wasted no time in following suit. It wrapped itself around Moon and watched as Vogue devoted a full page to the newcomer in 1969 that drew an image of her as “Former cover girl. Photography to laugh at other models. From portrait to reel, from film to needle, she has thus gone from amateur category to that of a professional, in one year.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">By now, Moon had already signed her first campaign for Cacharel for its spring 1968 collection. Her images lined the walls of Paris and invited people into the inner worlds of the women inhabiting them; all the while Moon wasn’t even — by the very definition of the term and whatever integrity education or experience may lend — a ‘photographer’ yet. </h1>
<h1 class="full">From the year 1970, which marked her move into fashion photography as an image-maker to reckon with, Moon’s career lay before her in submission, with a willingness to circumvent the established conventions of time, a diversion so deeply personal that it hardly sought to curate any defined statement. “Instead, I am expressing something, an echo of the world maybe,” she said.</h1>
<h1 class="full">An echo of the world is indeed the protagonist of the pure fiction she creates in her photographic work. Gaze into Moon’s imagery long enough, and you find yourself moved to sail off on an adventure to unravel the lore of its blur or its grain. </h1>
<h1 class="full"> What makes the woman in the frame, almost as if it were on a whim, half-turn her back to the photographer? What makes another tear through the containment of its paper-prison with haunted doe-eyes? What could Moon have possibly whispered to a model that forms a half-smile of parted lips before the illusory makes its sweet escape? While these are questions a viewer grapples with, Moon is hardly preoccupied with manipulating the destinies of those whose creator she becomes in her own visual world. </h1>
<h1 class="full"> She watches them unfold from a distance, her lens interfering only now and then, lest the evanescence of beauty be so fleeting that it is destroyed in its own waking state.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Her early work and eventual twenty-year-long collaboration with Cacharel is a testament to this very practice. At a time when her male contemporaries had templatized the overt sexual dimension of the female form in fashion photography, Sarah Moon changed the codes of fashion photography, with heroines that reside in an alternate universe where they attain an autonomy of existence with a lack of urgency, and through the act of waiting.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Her models lounge near a window or sit by the dresser; rosy-mouthed, dark-eyed, austere-faced, lace-trimmed nightgown and all, in unabashed pursuit of leisure and its tiny mutiny against guilt. Leisure that often evades a woman. A soft cry erupts from the throat, a finger is traced with tenderness along the length of each passing hour, a fold in the fabric owes itself to girlhood adventurism — Sarah Moon composes the suspense of each gesture, suggesting the happenstance but never fully revealing its occurrence.</h1>
<h1 class="full">The clothes exhibited are accessory to the story of escapism of those wearing them as Moon plunges a knife into the heart of lived experience and extracts only those imaginations that are almost-lost, not etched in solidified memory. Experimentation, from colour to technique, from movement to light, forms the core of her art. Her images from those years are in slightly sepia tones, a chromatic exploration she lets go of over the years as she doesn’t “like magenta anymore”, in favour of her beloved black and white, and sometimes, deep, saturated colour.</h1>
<h1 class="full">At this point, Moon had shot to a kind of stardom. Working closely with Barbara Hulanicki of Biba, the trailblazing London clothing store, Moon became almost an in-house photographer for the boutique’s decadent, Art Deco-inspired campaigns. She was part of a small group of photographers who determined and shaped the visual landscape of a fashionable London post the Swinging Sixties. In 1972, she photographed the Pirelli calendar, becoming the first woman to do so. </h1>
<h1 class="full">The calendar, with its long history of provocative imagery, picturing models in the nude, all shapely breasts and water droplets dotting limbs, was reimagined the year Sarah Moon shot her dainty women with kohl-smudged eyes in archaic underwear.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Even when bare flesh peaks through, the sensuality elicited by Moon’s models escapes the voyeurism of roving eyes, for she views them as her equal. In the 1980s, with Commes des Garçons and the arrival of Japanese designers on the Parisienne scene, Sarah Moon shifted her focus from the fiction of her compositions to the fashion of the clothing. In working with Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto, she assessed how the clothing needed to be shot in full length to draw attention to its structure, the shifting and the static.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Her silhouettes stood in contrast to simple backdrops, the garments constructing the architecture of the image. Faces were ingested in their entirety by shadow or light, and concealed behind hands or hats.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Fashion never left Moon, it formed the focal point of her practice, to which all other paths returned. In addition to the complete oeuvre of her fashion photography, she is ever deepening her personal practice to extend it to situations that stir the human collective consciousness, objects that appear as refugees from death and finally, stories of childhood fascinations in her filmography. Remember, Moon’s life is a metamorphosis of its own making.</h1>
<h1 class="full">The year 1985 marked a turning point in her career, caused by the shock of the death of her assistant Mike Yavel and the departure of Corrine Sarrut from Cacharel. From this intense life event arose the question of finding a new space for expression and bathing in the freedom of solitary practice. She draws no boundaries between her early work and later explorations — themes, motifs and techniques bleeding into one another, making it more difficult for a person to assign a category to the kind of artist Moon is. In her images unfold a play of superimpositions, duplications, under-exposures and fabrications. Traces of decomposition on a polaroid are telling of time, and Moon likes that “the threat is already included in the framework.”</h1>
<h1 class="full">She lies in wait, looking for a coincidence between chance and desire, outside and inside, sun and moon, fleeting time and memory, with a gaze entirely reminiscent of childhood wonderment. Of the fear, the disgust, the virtue that appears as seemingly colossal emotions of a child, enough to crack the core of the earth open, which slowly wear away and lose magnitude when the head and the heart become jaded by norms and know-how.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Echoing the tales of the Brothers Grimm, the origin of cinema, from L’Aurore by F.W. Murnau to The Night of the Hunter by Charles Laughton, Moon’s defined chiaroscuro brought out in black and white, the colourscape that she thinks in, capturing the basest fascinations of childhood aided by the refinement of an artist.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Entering Moon’s visual universe is nothing short of entering a labyrinth of light and dark. The sky never bursts with blue. Rain is always lightly falling on the world. Cobblestones appear greyer than usual. A black bird of omen screeches across the page. Smoke is dishevelled from chimney-necks. Twin legs in stockings bury themselves in grass blades, reaching but never touching a lotus bed. A gaping mouth melts into sludge. In the gradients and layers of Moon’s black and white, there resides a grey concealed. In this grey sits a mirror to our inner worlds, and Sarah Moon, a ‘sovereign of shadows’, beckons with soft fingertips and guides us into it. She shows us where to look to see ourselves.</h1>
<h1 class="full">In her cinema of successive still images, the heaving anxieties of childhood are evoked in search of an eternal world, one where time abandons all linearity and notions of speed to dwindle back and forth until it knots into itself. Her films, inspired by the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault, like Moon’s Little Black Riding Hood, let the viewer into the dark, dissenting from the erupting colour in which such tales are typically envisioned. Yet, somehow, her filmography retains the rolling vastness of imagination and freedoms as seen by a child.</h1>
<h1 class="full">In her lengthy career, Sarah Moon has seen her work exhibited in galleries and museums around the world and published in many books — among the most important are Coincidences, Circus, The Red Thread, 1,2,3,4,5, which was awarded the Prix Nadar in 2008 and PastPresent in 2020. She has directed several films, including a feature film Mississippi One (1991), and photographed as many images as would last a lifetime. Moon has traversed through time to remain what can be best called an icon through it all.</h1>
<h1 class="full">One can attempt to contain her life in perfectly executed photographs or crunch it into world-limit contortions, but the fact remains:</h1>
<h1 class="full">A portrait of Sarah Moon will forever be the portrait of an enigma.</h1>