6Sarah Moon at Michael Hoppen Gallery<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cSarah believes strongly in the atmosphere of a photograph or picture, rather than simply documentation,\u201d says her gallerist Michael Hoppen<\/a>, who has worked with Moon for 37 years. Today, the gallery opens a new exhibition of her work spanning 2003 to the present, the fifth solo show in a nearly four-decade collaboration. \u201cRather than simply photographing clothing, she aims to capture the \u2018indescribable ambiences\u2019 and the \u2018evanescence of beauty\u2019. She described the process of working at the archives as being in a \u2018precious casket.\u2019\u201d That fatalistic outlook is also articulated in the words of her late husband, the French publisher Robert Delpire, who wrote that \u201cSarah knows instinctively that the petals fall too soon,\u201d when publishing a five-volume survey of her work.\u00a0<\/p>\n Designers including Dior, Comme des Gar\u00e7ons, Chanel and Yohji Yamamoto have sought her eye over decades-long collaborations that even now, in her eighties, show no sign of ending. Most remarkably, she works with an almost unprecedented artistic freedom and does not take briefs. Instead, she imbues her commercial shoots with her unique poetic authorship, in a true collaboration between designer and photographer.<\/p>\n When she was artistic director of Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri once said of Moon\u2019s collaboration with the house: \u201cSarah Moon\u2019s signature resides in her capacity to give form to unconscious movements and retrospective intuition and in her aptitude to image indescribable ambiences. For all these reasons, her vision is perfect for transcribing the story told by my creative process for the Dior collections: that of a woman anchored in her epoch, drawing her strength by listening to her emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n Moon\u2019s intuitive approach feels its way into form. \u201cAs soon as I take something out of its context, I am already in a fiction,\u201d she tells AnOther. \u201cAt the beginning, to make sense of what I was looking for, rather than a story, I used to create a situation. I don\u2019t do that anymore; I feel I am always expecting a story that I don\u2019t yet know. It is as if the instant I am wishing for and trying to provoke with all my strength will carry the story itself.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat is what drives my creative energy, knowing there is something ethereal, something different in the air\u201d \u2013 Sarah Moon<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s a sensibility that occupies the same universe as French poetic realism, in particular the doomed romanticism of director Marcel Carn\u00e9\u2019s fog-misted streets, stalked by a melancholy Jean Gabin in the 1938 film Quai des brumes. \u201cWhen I go outside, it is more about an echo between the world and me that I am looking for,\u201d says Moon.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI remember Jean Gabin said in Quai des brumes, \u2018When I see someone swimming, I see someone drowning.\u2019 Maybe that is the story of my photography. I photograph privilege; illusion; evanescence; unlikeness; and beauty. Then I seek for an emotion. It seems an even more hopeless quest \u2026 but I get there and my friends and models trust me to deliver something very unusual \u2013 that is what drives my creative energy, knowing there is something ethereal, something different in the air.\u201c<\/p>\n<\/a>
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Oiseau des \u00eeles, 2003Photography by Sarah Moon. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery<\/p>\n<\/a>
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Andrea pour Yohji Yamamoto (VII), 2022Photography by Sarah Moon. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery<\/p>\n\n
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Les toits de Paris, 2009Photography by Sarah Moon. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery<\/p>\n