Barcelona,
Born in France in 1941, Sarah Moon was a model before she became a photographer, and that sector, and advertising, are an inseparable part of her production, but this has expanded, especially since the eighties, in many directions, both technically and thematically: in the first sense, she experiments with patience and daring; in the second, she tries to capture scenes that arise from her own inner concerns, moving away from premeditation and calculation.
He refers to his images as one second fictionsas suggestions for narratives (not narratives in themselves) that we are to read in the content of a glance or in the sketched gestures of figures: the aim of this author is to give a glimpse of possible stories that she imagines and that do not necessarily have to have materialised, confirmations that there are more perceptual possibilities than those offered by the obvious and the evidence. She uses all kinds of cameras (from Polaroid to SLR), works both inside and outside her studio and, since approximately 1985, has moved between still images and moving images, producing short and feature films, in colour or black and white, based on her own plots or adapted from the classic tales of Perrault and Andersen.
In Moon’s insistently proposed journey into interiority, her continuous references to childhood memories stand out, not so much to specific biographical moments as to the virtues or states that we can associate with everyone’s childhood: wonder, curiosity and the ability to marvel at what is not yet contemplated with habit and custom, or goes completely unnoticed. The writer Anne Maurel has referred to her work as a way of fight tirelessly with the thief that is time.
Until next December, the Fundación Foto Colectania in Barcelona is dedicating the exhibition “El tiempo se detenda” (Time Stops) to this artist, whose journey has been structured by her. It consists of eighty photographs, linked to fashion, as we said, the earliest ones (she was commissioned by firms such as Cacharel, Chanel or Dior), and gradually more dreamlike and suggestive the rest, open to multiple interpretations and susceptible to being related both to dreams and to cinema due to their evocation of mystery and their frequent use of blur, the impression of movement and long exposures.
This institution gave Moon carte blanche to select the works on display and their order: these are eighty photos, a set of books and five films produced by Take Five Prod, with certain common links, such as the unusual representation of space and time, the testing of the camera as a tool to transform, and not capture, reality, and the search for the representation of essences and personal sensations; this French author very intentionally dispenses with any event, anecdote or defined message that moves away from her subjectivity. These features have a lot to do with the references of her cinematographic creations: German expressionism, mainly Murnau, Pabst and Carl Dreyer.
This montage, as Moon herself has stressed, has a lot to do with her previous exhibition “PasséPrésent” at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, although this time more recent projects have been added, such as the unreleased film Hors-Saisonproduced this year, in which black and white has been preferred over colour. The arrangement of the works is neither chronological nor entirely rational, but rather intuitive and based on associations derived from the imagination: the Frenchwoman thus wishes not to impose any specific vision of her photography, nor even seek to explain it; rather she chooses to adapt it to the spaces where it is presented without ceasing to pay attention to her own impulse.
Sarah Moon. “Time stands still”
COLECTANY PHOTO FOUNDATION
C/ Passeig Picasso, 14
Barcelona
From June 19 to December 22, 2024