BORN IN England in 1940, Moon’s early study was in drawing not photography. This comes through in the subtleties of the rendering in her work, with the use of various techniques resulting in aesthetics akin to lithography, painting and printmaking. By opening up her photography into other realms, her work has a tactile quality that flickers from fact to fiction with ease. Her skills in the darkroom and careful attention to the physical aspects of her photographs allow each image to exist as an object as well as a two-dimensional picture. Sepia colouring, for example, operates as a tool for antiquating an image, giving it the character of a much older work, often reminiscent of 19th century styles of composition and subject matter. This comes to the fore most acutely in her landscape work.
Working as a model from 1960 to 1966 in Paris and London also gave her an insight unfamiliar to many photographers. Her sense of being captured by the lens taught her that moments were not always created, but came about with patience. By not setting out to control every aspect of her photographs, she allows for something to begin through watching and waiting. ‘Very often I say to myself: I would like to make a photo where nothing happens. But in order to eliminate, there has to be something to begin with. For nothing to happen, something has to happen first.’1 Richard Avedon also did this, capturing the true nature of his sitters by delaying the depression of the shutter until their guard was dropped. His melancholic portrait of Marilyn Monroe is a fine example of this, showing the inner turmoil of a troubled icon whose fate is no less enigmatic today than Avedon’s photograph.
Moon’s imagery acts likes fragments of a story awaiting interpretation by the viewer, in a dreamy wilderness of her creation, demanding us to trace the steps that lead to it and beyond. By offering a narrative, we are not dictated to - but given choices as to where our own imaginations take us. Contemporary photographers, such as Gregory Crewdson, use a similar form of storytelling but with a more filmic approach. Moon’s pictures sit in a less defined place in the photographic canon, referencing many art forms and genres through texture and sense of place. Her models may not always be recognisable as their bodies and faces shift and move before the lens. The softness they leave on the negative acts like fingerprints on glass, visible yet malleable in Moon’s hands.
As a writer, filmmaker and director in her own right, Moon is best known for her direction in the cult award-winning film Mississippi 1, 1991, Point d’Interrogation, 1995, and Lumiere et Compagnie - whereby forty directors make short films using the Lumiere brothers’ original camera. Her enigmatic graceful style suits the medium perfectly and just like a smiling cat that occasionally bites, she entices with a visual language combined with an undercurrent of psychological darkness.
This darkness is ever-present when Moon uses existing children’s literature such as Little Red Riding Hood and re-interprets Hans Christian Anderson’s tragic story of The Little Match Girl with her Circus series. Each photograph is accompanied by a poem as haunting as the image it illustrates. Her signature dark visual aesthetic is propelled by the text and thus reveals the underlying disturbing themes in Anderson’s fairy stories. In the heart-wrenching conclusion of the tale, an image of a little girl lying on the ground at the bottom right corner of the blurry photograph stirs the emotions as the text opposite reads, ‘The next day, early in the morning, under the bridge close to the pathway, Jane is found dead, frozen’.
She revisits certain places and themes in her work time and time again. One such theme is the animal kingdom. Birds both alive and dead retain a sense of wonder. A colourful parrot is no more beautiful than a peacock in black and white. By layering, antiquating and imbuing the images with marks, tonal variations and solarization, there is a heightened feel of presence, which reads in a somewhat surreal hyper-reality.
Purists often cannot see the value of commercial work for an artist, somehow polluting their art by its association, however the discipline needed to do such work is acute. Moon uses her artistic verve to brighten the often-predictable genre of fashion and advertising photography. Her use of colour is manipulated and flattened to create what she describes as ‘untrue colour’. She has worked for designers such as Christian Lacroix, Comme des Garcons and Issey Miyake with her definitive style. The resulting imagery shifts and blurs reality into a twilight of shape and colour that suggests the clothing rather than purely depicting it. In doing so, her vision is not encumbered but ours is tested.
Sarah Moon’s work is often criticized for being too pretty. I do not agree. There is a pain in the beauty that lies just beneath the surface as if the image itself were mourning the decline of beauty in photography for beauty’s sake. Maybe such a critique can be described as the Post-Modern guilt. The popularity of Pictorialism faded and the movement was criticised for the same reasons, yet today the same photographs are now held in the highest esteem and keenly sought after and admired.
Moon’s photography can set a mysterious haunting tone to perfectly ordinary landscapes, objects and people, setting the stage for us to walk into in the third act – to then construct the rest from a memory we didn’t have. Her contribution to photography lies in between so many genres that she is ultimately indefinable. This is where the magic happens.
NOTES
1) Interview with Frank Horvat. Paris, November 1986
The author of The Art of Collecting Photography, Laura collects photographs, lectures and writes extensively on the subject for numerous magazines throughout the world. Based in London, she also runs a consultancy assisting emerging talent to exhibit and publish their work.
