Sarah Moon, Mystery and Sensuality (part one)

Sarah Moon by David Bailey
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Sarah Moon (born as Marielle Hadengue), is a French photographer. Initially a model, she turned to fashion photography in the 1970s. Since 1985, she has concentrated on gallery and film work

Sarah Moon is born in Vichy in 1941. In WWII her Jewish family is forced to leave occupied France for England, where, as a teenager, she takes up a study drawing.  At nineteen she starts working as a model in London and Paris (1960–1966) under the name Mallriee Hadengue. During these days she becomes interested in photography, taking shots of her model colleagues. In 1967, she finally decides to spend all her time on photography rather than modelling, adopting Sarah Moon as her new name.

Cacharel

Cacharel commercials

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She soon becomes consultant and photographer for Cacharel fashion house, which advertisement films made her win the Lion D’Or in 1979. She also gets commissioned for some of the most important magazines of that time, among which there are Vogue, Marie-Claire, Harpers’ Bazaar, Elle.

Sarah successfully captures the fashionable atmosphere of London after the “swinging sixties”, working closely with Barbara Hulanicki, who has just launched the popular department store Biba.

Biba

Biba in Seventeen Magazine January 1971 

Biba in Seventeen Magazine January 1971 

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In 1972, Sarah Moon shot the Pirelli calendar, the first woman to do so. She worked in Paris, at the Villa des Tilleuls, in a rich, blurry colour reminiscent of Degas’ paintings of ballerinas. The models are small women, childlike, with rosebud lips and dressed, mostly, in archaic underwear. What little bare flesh there is seems accidental — and quite unvoyeuristic. The pictures are certainly sensual but quite unsexual. The air is of a fin-de-siècle brothel in which the customers and bosses have gone home, leaving the girls to themselves. The Villa des Tilleuls was the Paris headquarters of the Gestapo.Hers is a world of young women — girls, almost. The few men in it are hidden, sometimes behind animal masks. 

Pirelli calendar

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“Each photography is the last witness, or even the last evidence of a moment that would otherwise be lost forever; it is the sense of loss, and of time passing by …”

Sarah Moon

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Early Editorial Photographs 

Vogue Italia 1972

Vogue Paris, February 1973

Vogue Paris 1973 

UK Vogue April 1972

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Marielle Hadengue, with boyfriend, Francois Fould, wearing `his’ & `her’ shirts made from cotton the French call `Farmer’s Satin’. Ph. Bill Ray

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info: Vogue Italia, WikiPedia and YouTube