VOGUE Reviews Sarah Moon "on the edge"

Vogue

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.

-Mark Holgate