.jpg)
.jpg)
When Sarah Moon was sitting opposite me at New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery this past Wednesday, all I could think was: Am I fanboying too much? Moon, if you’re not familiar, is a French artist who, at the age of 83, has amassed several lifetimes of incredible work ranging from her highly distinctive images of fashion to architecture to nature to portraiture—as well as moviemaking. Her new show, on the edge, opens at Howard Greenberg this Saturday.
Ahead of our meeting, there had been a flurry of emails exchanged about the show, including this brief précis Moon had kindly written by way of introduction to on the edge: “It has always been my way to turn my gaze on everything, including fashion, since the very beginning. The choice of these 30 photos at Howard Greenberg is a short summary.”
The title of the show, meanwhile, refers to Moon’s preference for subject to be removed from its context and experienced in the absolute moment—and it’s only after chatting with her that one realizes that among her many gifts is the ability to evoke the terrain that lies between concision and expansion. I told a friend later that night that the delight of speaking with Moon had felt like following a particularly beautiful butterfly around the room—a beguiling spectacle driven by a curiosity to discover where it would land next. The same can be said of her pictures, where specificity is a bit of a red herring. In reality, her images, borne out of intellectual and emotional curiosity, offer infinite possibilities, narratives, and interpretations: What looks concrete and definite is something of an illusion—including the work in this show, which ranges in time from the late 1980s to pictures taken in the last year or so.
There’s the model Sveta wearing turquoise Hussein Chalayan, a conceptualized vision of a ruffle-engulfed Lautrecian showgirl from the Folies Bergère; a woman seen only from the back (a favored visual trope of Moon’s) walking like Philippe Petit across a tightrope in a yawning room; umbrella trees etched to dramatic effect against a Tuscan sky; and a close-up of an amaryllis which takes the eye close to the stem and stalks and the hint of the bloom in a delicate color palette—a thing, literally and metaphorically, of beauty. To be able to see these and other images in person, with their majestic orchestration of light and either color or black and white, is quite the gift. (With the color work, there’s something rather of the Bloomsbury group’s iconic palette, which might be intentional: Virginia Woolf, affirmed Moon, is a heroine of hers.)
To be honest, though, I have just done the thing that Moon’s pictures so brilliantly and captivatingly evade: stating what is directly in your line of vision. “Something I’ve always been interested in, and now I can do, is mixing fashion, places, portraits, and everything together,” she said. “Fashion has been something I’ve done and enjoyed—I love fashion—but I also like other things. I’ve photographed whatever had an echo.” Moon is not so interested, though, in having to signpost everything. “I can’t put words on it, because it would distort it,” she said. “I mean: Why was this photograph taken in Coney Island, or the tightrope, or the two giraffes, or a friend walking…. What happened in the photo meant something: That’s what I mean about the echo. Each image in this show says a story to me. It’s a response to whatever I responded to.”
She walked over to the image of the trees in Tuscany which was, like all the others, neatly lined up against the wall, waiting to be hung. “I can look at a tree 10 times and I don’t feel anything when I pass in front, but suddenly it echoes. Suddenly what it feels corresponds to what it says. Fashion is different,” she continued, “because fashion is an assignment, so you have to respond. But at the same time, you can’t respond if you don’t understand.”
To give a little of Moon’s own story: Born in France as Marielle Warin, she and her parents decamped to London during World War II, before she returned as an adult. She started going by the name Sarah Moon in the 1960s, and was working as a model before starting, at the end of the decade, to take photographs herself. Just before that professional pivot, she had taken pictures of a friend, Mary Knopka, for a book. “Was she a model?” I asked. “No, she was a hippie,” Moon responded, with a gentle laugh. “That was a profession back in the ’60s.”
One day a photographer got sick and couldn’t do a job, and he suggested Moon for the gig. Before long, she was creating images for Cacharel, after her friend Corinne Sarrut went there to design the label with Emmanuelle Khan, and with Barbara Hulanicki at Biba, where she created hauntingly impressionistic images with a veiled Art Deco haze denuded of nostalgia. Her work then certainly didn’t belie the notion that Moon was shooting in an era where women were increasingly emancipated and empowered—her pictures were powerful because they presented a sense of the internal as much as the external: women stripped of pose or artifice, their inner lives and personalities bleeding through into the images in a manner that had never quite been seen before.
“I was very lucky,” Moon says of the start of her photography career. “It was a time where everything was possible. When I see now how difficult it is… but for me, being a woman then was not difficult at all. Feminism was more important in the US than in France—it was only in 1972 with the law proposed by Simone Veil that a wider consciousness was aroused—but I probably benefited from the fact I had been working as a model, and the world of fashion was not totally foreign to me. It was a different dialogue—when women are posing, it is a dialogue with the camera. I was just asking nothing. It was like backstage more than on-stage.”
That the dialog with those in front of her camera was so fluent is likely due, in no small part, to her generosity of spirit. She sings the praises of the stylist Patti Wilson, whom she loves working with (including, quite recently, on a series of images for Dior); her agent Guillaume Fabiani, with whom she collaborates on books and exhibitions, and who made this trip with her to the States; the late New York-based photographer Lillian Bassman, whom Moon was commissioned to take a portrait of before the two became good friends—one imagines this happens a lot—and, from early on in her career, Mike Yavel, who was her assistant for fifteen years before he died of AIDS. “I’m very, very grateful to Mike. He taught me what I didn’t know,” Moon says. “When people say to me, When did you begin? I say: around ’68—but really I began in the ’70s, with him. Anyway, it was a long time ago.”
Like many people with long and illustrious careers, Moon is a person who can view the past fondly without wanting to dwell there creatively. Especially when the present is so interesting. Quite recently, architecture has sparked her interest, and she was intrigued by our pre-interview chatter by the raw industrial desolation of Scott Avenue in Bushwick, location of the previous night’s Luar show. Her eyes lit up—she was already thinking about going off there to explore.
Sarah Moon, on the edge, Howard Greenberg Gallery, February 17th to April 6th 2024
