Born Marielle Warin in Nazi occupied France, Sarah Moon’s parents fled to England soon after her birth. Studying art, she started her career in front of the lens as a model in the London of the ‘swinging 60’s’ before being increasingly drawn to taking pictures herself.
When publishing her first professional photographs, she picked her ethereal name ‘Moon’ to hide her profession as a model: ‘I had to choose a name because I didn’t want people to stop working with me because I was doing photographs. It was a way of hiding.’
The celestial nature of that name and the sense of something hidden could not be more apt to describe her mysterious and compelling images. Although she is often still associated with the high-end fashion photography that made her name, her other-worldly pictures have always transcended the commercial, existing in a realm closer to fairy-tale.
There is something unashamedly nostalgic about her black and white photographs – a bewitching quality: ‘I charge [the photographs] with something other than reality, with feeling…’
It is a search for the elusive, the poetic moment: ‘That instance of grace that I nearly missed, and that will never happen again’
