Second-Long Fictions

Abstract

Sarah Moon 12345 Royal College Of Art London October 17-25, 2008 Michael Hoppen Gallery London October 16-November 22, 2008 Sarah Moon 12345 By Sarah Moon with additional texts by Dominique Edde, llona Suschitsky, Magali Jauffret, Alain Fleischer and Robert Delpire London: Thames & Hudson, 2008 486 pp./[pounds sterling]95.00 (sb) It is a testament to the lasting appeal of Sarah Moon's photography that her soft-focused grainy aesthetic remains so evocative of the romantic femininity peddled in the pages of fashion magazines from the 1970s. Although undeniably nostalgic, the original celebrated advertising campaigns for Cacharel and editorial shots for Vogue and Nova were rarely cloying or overly sentimental, haunted as they were by an underlying narrative of disquieting uncase. Describing her photographs as second-long fictions, Moon continues to explore the various facets of feminine experience in both her fashion photography and personal practice--two distinct but overlapping strands that were reconciled in two exhibitions of the photographer's work in London this Fall. At Michael Hoppen Gallery, the display focused on examples from Moon's thirty-year commercial career, while at the Royal College of Art more experimental work was included, with rooms dedicated to two recent films. shows coincided with the publication by Thames & Hudson of Sarah Moon 12345, whose title reflects its composite structure of five chapter-like notebooks in a slipcase cover. A personal rather than chronological retrospective in which Moon attempted to revisit and update the past (3), the book's pages mix and present in an album-like format that was echoed in the installation at the RCA. Hung four or five deep on the gallery walls, the undated and untitled photographs weaved an unresolved narrative that emphasized the work's dream-like quality, as if fleeting snatches of memory on the brink of being forgotten. It was in this display of personal work that a darker vision of femininity emerged. Strange motifs recurred--of lone women wandering lonely streets and abandoned fairgrounds or waiting in the wings backstage, conjuring a sense of unfulfilled anticipation as a distinctly feminine condition. Particularly pronounced in Moon's reworking of the fairy stories The Little and Bluebeard in the new films Mermaid of Auderville (2007) and Red Thread (2005), that sense of suspense was heightened by the combination of still shots and moving images to tell tales of adolescent femininity on the verge of sexual awakening, marked by periods of waiting, longing, and ultimately of disappointment. Elsewhere, that awakening had more sinister consequences: in shots produced to illustrate Creative Education's 1983 edition of Little Red Riding Hood, the viewer took the position of the big bad wolf stalking its prey through the urban forest. Pictured only as a nightmarish shadow cast from a position behind the camera, our identification with the wolf's predatory presence implicated the viewer in a narrative of desire in which female sexuality was to be consumed. …