SARAH MOON
Coincidences
March 31, 2011 through May 31, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 31, 7 - 9 p.m.
The Fahey/Klein gallery is pleased to present a selection of photographs from contemporary French photographer, Sarah Moon, in her first Los Angeles exhibition. This exhibition features a selection of over seventy color and black & white photographs from both her personal bodies of work, as well as her seminal fashion photography. Sarah Moon’s unique photographic style and printing techniques result in a distinctive aesthetic that blurs the line between image and object, fantasy and reality.
Sarah Moon has been a photographer, filmmaker, and artist for over 35 years. As one of the first female haute couture photographers, she has created images for designers including Chanel, Cacharel, Comme des Garçons, Christian Lacroix, and Issey Miyake. Sarah Moon’s textural and moody images transcend and redefine the genre of fashion photography. Moon’s images depict a poetic and fictional aesthetic which borders on the surreal. She manipulates and flattens her photographs’ palette to result in what she refers to as ultimately “untrue color” which vaguely suggests, rather than accurately depicts, the garments she is capturing.
“In the world of Sarah Moon, life and death are woven together in the same cloth. They are without frontiers. For both, the world is a child grown old in a day. It is not blood, but dreams, that run through her veins. Everywhere beauty is the outlet of loneliness, it is the patina.” (1,2,3,4,5, Dominique Eddé )
Although she may be best known for her distinctive fashion images, her oeuvre includes a large body of photographs and films that blend genres as she depicts haunting landscapes and captivating portraits, as well as reinvents and reinterprets classic, macabre fairytales in several of her personal projects. Moon meticulously directs and stages her photographs, and then patiently waits for the unexpected to happen— attempting to capture an elusive and fleeting single moment. “For me photography is pure fiction, even if it comes from life. I photograph people, of course, as I do nature – trees, flowers, animals – but I charge it with some thing other than reality, with feeling, with a certain feeling depending on the day. I compare myself to reportage photographers, who make some sort of statement about life. I don’t believe that I am making any defined statement. Instead, I am expressing something, an echo of the world maybe.” (“Frocks and Fantasy”, Guardian UK)
Sarah Moon was born in 1941, she currently lives and works as a filmmaker, director, writer, and photographer in Paris.