Sarah Moon, Pour Junko Watanabe, 2014
Collector Daily
Developing a uniquely personal photographic look and feel is certainly harder than it might seem, but across nearly six decades of work, much of it made in a fashion context, Sarah Moon has undeniably crafted a durable signature style. “Painterly” is the adjective most often applied to the tactile complexity of Moon’s imagery, but in her best works, there’s something far more seductive going on. Over the years, she has refined an expressive kind of photographic approximation, where edges and colors are softened to the point that they become fluid essences. When a model in a dress is given the Moon treatment, we see the elemental lines and formal shapes of that dress more than anything else, to which we then graft our own ideas of romance, mystery, grace, or melancholy.