They say nostalgia is denial of the painful present, and Sarah Moon’s photography serves as the bittersweet refuge. Her lens suspends emotions in time, her compositions instill a nostalgic longing for a time before your own. Born in the ‘40s yet flourishing in the ‘70s, Moon’s mastery unfolded through a delicate interplay of soft focus, muted colours and atmospheric lighting, often coupled with blended elements of fashion and fine art. In tandem, a profound sense of poetic beauty emanates from her images, fostering that feeling of sentimentality for past epochs. Her talent has earned her work with esteemed periodicals from Vogue to Harper’s Bazaar, and now, her permanent imprint built over four decades of photography commands attention at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York with the exhibition On the Edge.
From February 17th through April 6th 2024, the exhibit draws viewers in New York into a space of more than thirty photographs, where each frame teeters on the brink of a moment. In Sarah Moon’s own words, “All along, I tried to avoid the anecdote, looking for an echo between what I see and what I feel, trying to reach that visual point of no return, that second that cannot happen again (…) Today, I realise that minimalism means more and more to me whatever I photograph, trying to get to the essential of what I see, cropping the subject out of its context, reducing it to that second, to that limit of time, grasping light before it vanished. The photos I am presenting here are on the edge of that attempt.”
Where the dreamy meets the dazzling, the mysterious meets the compelling. Moon stood between the confines of a male-dominated field and the burgeoning possibilities for women photographers, yet her intimate feminine gaze and blurred aesthetic provoked ingenuity and sparked the seeds of change. We impel you to experience On the Edge, and if you happen to be free on February 17th from 3 to 5 pm for the opening reception, you very well might meet her!
Sarah Moon, La Funambule, 2003.
Sarah Moon, L'échappée belle, 2021.