Sarah Moon Brings Her Beguiling and Enigmatic Images To New York

There’s the model Sveta wearing turquoise Hussein Chalayan, a conceptualized vision of a ruffle-engulfed Lautrecian showgirl from the Folies Bergère; a woman seen only from the back (a favored visual trope of Moon’s) walking like Philippe Petit across a tightrope in a yawning room; umbrella trees etched to dramatic effect against a Tuscan sky; and a close-up of an amaryllis which takes the eye close to the stem and stalks and the hint of the bloom in a delicate color palette—a thing, literally and metaphorically, of beauty. To be able to see these and other images in person, with their majestic orchestration of light and either color or black and white, is quite the gift. (With the color work, there’s something rather of the Bloomsbury group’s iconic palette, which might be intentional: Virginia Woolf, affirmed Moon, is a heroine of hers.)

To be honest, though, I have just done the thing that Moon’s pictures so brilliantly and captivatingly evade: stating what is directly in your line of vision. “Something I’ve always been interested in, and now I can do, is mixing fashion, places, portraits, and everything together,” she said. “Fashion has been something I’ve done and enjoyed—I love fashion—but I also like other things. I’ve photographed whatever had an echo.” Moon is not so interested, though, in having to signpost everything. “I can’t put words on it, because it would distort it,” she said. “I mean: Why was this photograph taken in Coney Island, or the tightrope, or the two giraffes, or a friend walking…. What happened in the photo meant something: That’s what I mean about the echo. Each image in this show says a story to me. It’s a response to whatever I responded to.”