Any second now the arm will come down and Codie will have to decide what to do with her face. For the moment she is spared: the forearm crosses her eyes like a censor’s bar, leaving only the parted lips and the chin to carry on the business of being looked at. It is the gesture of someone dazzled, or exhausted, or auditioning for a silent film in which fainting is a career. The blur agrees with all three readings and confirms none of them.
Meanwhile the blouse is doing something extraordinary. Its ruffles run in tiers across her body like the pages of a book left open in the wind, and her other hand rests flat on her stomach, either steadying herself or checking that she is still there. Around all this the border has been left ragged and streaked, dripping down the right-hand edge, so that the picture seems to be weathering its own private storm. You could stand in front of it a long time waiting for the moment after, which never comes.
Moon spent her first professional life being photographed, and everything since has the air of someone who knows exactly what the other side of the lens feels like: the shielding gesture here is practically a memoir. She has become one of the most collected living French photographers by making fashion pictures that dissolve into dream at the edges, and this gelatin silver print, with its deep charcoal grain, is where the dream gets fixed. Not woken from. Fixed.
Any second now the arm will come down and Codie will have to decide what to do with her face. For the moment she is spared: the forearm crosses her eyes like a censor’s bar, leaving only the parted lips and the chin to carry on the business of being looked at. It is the gesture of someone dazzled, or exhausted, or auditioning for a silent film in which fainting is a career. The blur agrees with all three readings and confirms none of them.
Meanwhile the blouse is doing something extraordinary. Its ruffles run in tiers across her body like the pages of a book left open in the wind, and her other hand rests flat on her stomach, either steadying herself or checking that she is still there. Around all this the border has been left ragged and streaked, dripping down the right-hand edge, so that the picture seems to be weathering its own private storm. You could stand in front of it a long time waiting for the moment after, which never comes.
Moon spent her first professional life being photographed, and everything since has the air of someone who knows exactly what the other side of the lens feels like: the shielding gesture here is practically a memoir. She has become one of the most collected living French photographers by making fashion pictures that dissolve into dream at the edges, and this gelatin silver print, with its deep charcoal grain, is where the dream gets fixed. Not woken from. Fixed.