Sarah Moon, At the Still Point — Ariane Noël de Tilly

[Summer 2022]

By Ariane Noël de Tilly

Fotografiska, New York
15.10.2021— 6.02.2022

[Excerpt]
It was La robe à pois (1996), a large-format photograph placed at the entrance to the exhibition, that invited visitors to immerse themselves in the enigmatic universe, sometimes in colour but usually in black and white, of French photographer Sarah Moon. In this image, a standing woman, her head tilted forward, covers her eyes with her hands. The size of the photograph, the low angle of the shot, and the tight framing monumentalize the woman and her dress. The light is soft, the background a desaturated blue, and the photograph out of focus, because it was taken at very slow speed. By creating such images, with a granular texture that, as a consequence, lack details, Moon invites us to imagine them, to ask ourselves what pictures are not showing. The exhibition Sarah Moon: At the Still Point brought together an impressive selection of photographs, films, and books dating, with a few exceptions, from the last thirty years.

Moon, who also curated the exhibition, hung the works very close together and didn’t follow a chronological or thematic organization; on most of the walls, she juxtaposed photographs from different series and periods. Moon has the gift of transforming a scene that could be interpreted as banal, such as the one of three dogs running on a beach (Les chiens de Maria, 2000), into an enigmatic and visually sublime event…
Translated by Käthe Roth

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 120 – FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION ]
[ Complete article and more images, in digital version, available here: Sarah Moon, At the Still Point — Ariane Noël de Tilly ]