Our photography piece for today is the “About Colour” Exhibition at Michael Hoppen Gallery by Sarah Moon.

The daughter of Jewish parents who fled occupied France for England during WWII, Sarah (born Marielle Hadengue) studied drawing before working as a model in London and Paris in the 60s. During this time, she took an interest in photography, and she began shooting her model colleagues. She decided to take it up full time in 1970, taking the name Sarah Moon.

Known for her ethereal and elegant work, Sarah soon rose to prominence for portraying the demise of the sixties and rise of punk through her nostalgic and almost abstract photographs. Her first campaigns, for London brands Biba and then Cacharel, soft-focus and enigmatic, were inspired by the aesthetics of 1920s filmmakers like the Soviet Sergei Eisenstein and Germans G.W. Pabst, Carl Theodor Dreyer and F.W. Murnau.

These campaigns were quickly followed by work with Dior, Chane, Comme de Garcons, Christian Lacroix, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto, as published in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life. She also became the first woman to photograph the Pirelli Calendar in 1972.

As portrayed in her About Colour’ Exhibition, Sarah seldom showed the entire figure in her work, leaving the face often hidden or cropped out, to portray a sense of mystery and ethereality, often photographing the models from the back, as if they belonged to some transitory, transitional place or a fragment of a memory. In these compositions, she aimed for the women to convey both strength and fragility. Blurring, unusual cropping, scratches and distortions gave them an almost painterly aspect, often taken using Polaroid positive/negative film.

In addition, she works with a rare colour-printing technique known as direct-carbon printing, which produces saturated hues that add to the sense of unreality. Also called, Fresson prints, it is named after the French family that invented it, handing it down through generations since 1899 and some of whose elements remain secret. Self taught, Moon explains that she always includes mysterious shadows, low-speed-exposure effects and double exposures, a process that evokes “the movement of the wind”.