Caroline Rabourdin Nov 23, 2008

November is the ‘mois de la photo’ in Paris and I push the door of the Camera Obscura galerie for the first time, even though I pass its window every week to get to the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture. I already knew Sarah Moon’s work as a fashion photographer for magazines. Her highly evocative images, blurred and evanescent, attempting to capture the idea of movement and time. Her work goes beyond moving figures, and in this exhibition some landscape and urban scenes show the same obsession with time both as subject and object of representation. More than a simple allusion, the processing of the images is used to show the different stages of the making of the images. One can almost see the marks of the developing solution on the paper, which does not reach the fringes of the image, or the traces left by the drying process. The artist has even deliberately rubbed off part of the photo at this stage, to hide its subject. Attention should be drawn to the metal frames, themselves bearing traces of their fabrication process, in the roughly polished angles. Whistanding  the nostalgy of black and white or sepia images, Sarah Moon turns the art of the instant into the narration of its fabrication.