The swimming pool is one of architecture's stranger rooms, built for immersion yet here holding no water we can see and no one swimming in it. Sarah Moon seats her figure on the tiled floor at the pool's edge, knees folded to one side, an arm let down to the ground as if to test a surface that has gone missing. The olive cap, the powder-blue top banded in black, the mottled shorts: the uniform of an afternoon's exercise, drained by Moon of any athletic purpose. Her carbon print holds it all in a grain like settling dust, the colour pulled back toward memory, the light the temperature of a municipal bath lit after closing time.
What the photograph keeps is the pause around the act, never the act itself. The model bows her head and looks at nothing, while the long horizontal bands of the wall — grey, a stripe of black, one panel of faded yellow — press the tiles flat into something nearer a painting than a changing room. Moon came up through fashion, and the discipline survives in the poise of the body, yet the image refuses the bargain fashion strikes. Nothing is for sale here. The picture is too quiet, the woman too far inside her own thought.
This is photography as reverie rather than record, a still thing about stillness. To stand before it is to feel the chlorine hush of a public pool emptied of its noise, and to suspect the subject was never the water at all, but the particular cold of waiting at the edge of it.
The swimming pool is one of architecture's stranger rooms, built for immersion yet here holding no water we can see and no one swimming in it. Sarah Moon seats her figure on the tiled floor at the pool's edge, knees folded to one side, an arm let down to the ground as if to test a surface that has gone missing. The olive cap, the powder-blue top banded in black, the mottled shorts: the uniform of an afternoon's exercise, drained by Moon of any athletic purpose. Her carbon print holds it all in a grain like settling dust, the colour pulled back toward memory, the light the temperature of a municipal bath lit after closing time.
What the photograph keeps is the pause around the act, never the act itself. The model bows her head and looks at nothing, while the long horizontal bands of the wall — grey, a stripe of black, one panel of faded yellow — press the tiles flat into something nearer a painting than a changing room. Moon came up through fashion, and the discipline survives in the poise of the body, yet the image refuses the bargain fashion strikes. Nothing is for sale here. The picture is too quiet, the woman too far inside her own thought.
This is photography as reverie rather than record, a still thing about stillness. To stand before it is to feel the chlorine hush of a public pool emptied of its noise, and to suspect the subject was never the water at all, but the particular cold of waiting at the edge of it.