A photographer since 1970 and a filmmaker since 1978, Sarah Moon, born in 1941, defies conventions and subverts codes to construct a body of work of irreducible singularity. The scope of her creativity constantly expands, from still images to moving pictures, from fashion photography and advertising films to personal exploration, starting in 1985, without ever abandoning any aspect.
What stands out is the continuity of work carried out with boldness and patience, perseverance and invention: it is neither calculated nor premeditated, but the result of an inner necessity—the need to express the echo of the world deep within oneself. From her beginnings in fashion and advertising, Sarah Moon has worked to make each photograph “a one-second fiction.”
Each of her images is a story she does not tell but rather suggests, containing it within the suspense of a gesture or the enigma of a gaze: a whole possible world, not yet realized, that she has managed to glimpse and allows us to glimpse as well.
Sarah Moon explores the reverse side of the obvious and expands the real world with possible worlds. In the studio or outdoors, with an SLR, a Polaroid, or a movie camera, in feature or short films (Mississippi One, in 1991, or her five unsentimental adaptations of Perrault’s and Andersen’s tales, including Circuss - 2002 and Little Black Riding Hood - 2010), she pursues traces buried in memory, watching for the coincidence between images born within and things from the outside.
The film or photograph she creates reveals the richness of an inner life haunted by the emotions of “childhood rediscovered at will” (Baudelaire): not a particular childhood, the one from biography, but the state or virtue of childhood, the wonder and fear produced by the abrupt contact with the world before the eye and heart become prisoners of conventions and worn down by habit.
At regular intervals, Sarah Moon has published, first with Robert Delpire, her husband, books that serve as punctuation marks in a continuous creative movement. In them, she gathers those images from her past that reignite her: Vrais semblants, Sarah Moon in the Photo Poche collection, Coïncidences, 1,2,3,4,5, Alchimies, and in 2020 PasséPrésent—the catalogue of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris exhibition. For someone who does not separate work from personal life, photography and film are a way to struggle with time, that thief.
Anne Maurel
4 June 2025
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