Sarah Moon

A Look… At Sarah Moon, a French photographer born in 1941 who started out as a model. In 1970, she left her modelling career to become a photographer. I LOVE her work , which first caught my eye through her longstanding relationship with French brand Cacharel. The campaign for their first perfume, Anaïs Anaïs and the notorious lolita-esque launch of the Loulou fragrance, are, I think, engrained in every French teen born in the 70s. Whatever her subject matter, from high fashion to the mundane, each of Moon’s picture drag you into a phantasmagorical and dream-like world full of metaphors, where time seems to stand still but yet retains a sense of the present.

‘I photograph privilege, illusion, evanescence, unlikeness and beauty ; then I seek for emotion, an even more hopeless quest. I’ve often envied those who photograph life. I avoid it. I start from nothing, I make up a story which is left untold; I imagine a situation which doesn’t exist, I wipe out a space to invent another, I shift the light, I rend unreal and then I try. I watch out for the unexpected, I wait to see what I’ve forgotten. I undo what I put together, I hope for hazard, but more than anything, I long to be struck as I shoot.’ Sarah Moon