Sarah Moon has created images for over more than 150 advertising campaigns-often for Fashion Houses and Cosmetic companies in France and elsewhere. She is particularly famous for her fashion photography and she is considered one of the great photographers of the 20th century. Unlike, those professionals of Art for Art, who have enough talent and the good fortune to be commercially successful, but would never dream of pushing too far, Sarah Moon’s career is noted for the love of transformation and its continual growth. Moon was a successful model in the 1960s, in 1968, she was signed by Cacharel and she created her first advertising campaign. The Impressionist character, soft and delicate colours, intriguing themes soon found favour with magazines such as Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Elle and Stern. It was not long before Moon became interested in films and towards the end of the 1970s her adverts were appearing at numerous European Festivals(In 1979 she won the Grand Prix in Cannes).While during the 1980s ,she transformed again, doing personal research in both photography and film.

Last year, her work was presented at an important retrospective exhibition at the Centre National de la Photographie di Paris and a selection of these prints were on show at the Carla Sozzani Gallery in Milan this autumn. All the images on show in Milan represented a part of her personal research which has been at the heart of her production since 1985.Hers is a fascinating cinema born from fashion photography and taken one step further to prompt the spectator to see the “secret and lies” of the magic of photography.

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TAKEN FROM AN INTERVIEW OF SARAH MOON

Do you think that the moment you limit what you show, the spectator begins to show more interest in the way the information or content is presented?

S.M. I appreciate quality, even if I enjoy trying to make it look wrong. I like playing with the grain of a photograph, with light, with the balance between black and white and so on. In my early work I used a large grain and it was often said that this gave the images an impressionist look. I wanted to make the prints beautiful , this technique was a sort of betrayal of how I see photography today and what I expect from it.

Does you research for quality include digital manipulation?

S.M. I don’t use it a lot, but I’m not against it either. I mainly use them in videos to correct colours and similar things. However, I don’t want the intervention of the camera to be obvious “the kitchen” as I call it. When I’m about to take a photograph everything is nearly always in place and if any changes are needed to be made, they are made straightaway. I can’t stand the idea that electronic retouching becomes a style. I don’t really like the cameras. I use them like everybody else and I’m grateful that they exist, even if I prefer the manual type, which are more artistic.

Which artists have influenced you the most?

S.M. More than an influence I think it is a combination of what is loved and hated, something seen in the street or have read somewhere. It’s like a potpourri: anything that moves or interests me remains. Often the photographers that I love the most have nothing to do with my work, such as Diane Arbus or Robert Frank. In fashion my guides have been Guy Bourdin, the most important French photographer of the 1970s.He is the one who gave me a chance, he probably gave others a chance as well, to tell stories to use fashion as a trampoline . He matched fashion images to his imagination, as Helmut Newton and Bob Richardson do.