BPC -- Photographer Of The Month (May, 2007)

"I remember a photo of my mother dressed in her Sunday's best, and I say no don't move let's try say cheese, and when she smiles she looks almost true" -- Sarah Moon

The first time I came across Sarah Moon’s name was from a video about Henri Cartier-Bresson. It was a movie she made to explorer the master’s view and mind. In about an hour, I saw the best documentary ever made on HCB. I didn’t know that time, Sarah Moon herself took photographs.

Born in France, 1941, Sarah Moon studied drawing in her early years. From 1960 to 1966, she worked as a model in London and Paris. And since 1967, she has been a fashion photographer and publicity filmmaker. She photographs dresses of women and women with dresses -- and by definition they are fashion photographs. Moreover, her works are photographs filled with mood, abstraction and dreams. They give out a unreal beauty of the style she wants to set, the dreams she want to catch, the unreal she wants to reveal.

The idea of photography is to capture the reality. Sarah Moon avoids to photograph life. In the studio or the field, she often starts from nothing, made up a story she was never told. She imagines the situation that doesn't exist, wipes out the space around it and invents another one. She shifts the lights and invents everything unreal. Then she press the shutters. In front her, the subject is not a model or an object. Rather, it is a picture she had created in her mind. She is photographing a image from another unreal photo.

She would cheat the perspectives, manipulate even the nature lighting, from up to down, the real is not real, but is a stage in her mind, then she photographs the unreal in her mind, again and again, every press on the shutter becomes theexpression of her feeling of the recognition.

Her latest series can be seen at http://www.kahitsukan.or.jp/sarc_e.html

Photo courtesy of Max Pam, Sarah Moon
Images are from following external Links:
http://www.voirvoireplus.com/pages-cv/cv_sarah_moon.htm
http://www.horvatland.com/pages/entrevues/07-moon-en_fr.htm