Kahitsukan Sarah Moon

My acquaintance with Sarah Moon's work has developed unhurriedly.

When I visited Sarah Moon's exhibitions, in 1984 and 1989, at Printemps Ginza in Tokyo, I still felt, however, that the photographs lacked something that fully convinced me.
What completely changed my attitude toward Sarah Moon was a documentary film, "Henri Cartier-Bresson Point d'interrogation" produced in 1994. Under Sarah's direction, this film superbly visualizes the highly perceptive and unrestricted world-view of Cartier-Bresson for whom I have great admiration and with whom I was quite close.
From this point started everything.

Although she claims that the most important thing in photography is to be in the right place when something unexpected takes place, Sarah Moon actually uses a highly elaborate creative methodology.
Intuitive in conception, Sarah Moon tries to represent in her photographic works scenes and stories not of this world by way of literary and pictorial allusions and of free associations with plants and animals in nature.

For printing her work, Sarah Moon uses sepia coloring on matte paper - an outdated technique that died out in the 1920s. The technique, however, does more than fair justice to Sarah's world of art.

Kahitsukan - Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art has recently had the good fortune to acquire a collection of 155 of Sarah Moon's monochrome and color prints. Included in the collection are all of the 32 photographs published in "STILL" - the photographs which have strongly appealed to me.

Sarah Moon, who approaches the art of photography with love, is thoroughly aware of the extent of cruelty that the camera can do. The photographs of Sarah Moon, who says that light is a surprise, a disappointment and delight, are, as it were, so many mirrors with memories.

Sarah's poetic and fantasy-laden works gradually change their focus to the ephemeral and the evanescent. The closer we look at her photgraphs, the more sharply we come to be aware of their close ties to such symbols of darkness in human existence as fears, old age and death.
Something absolute and inevitable sooner or later comes to visit every artist who aspires for beauty. Sarah Moon is waiting for that crucial moment.
When I softly close my eyes, I always seem to hear Sarah Moon triggering a shutter.

(Director, Kahitsukan - Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art)
(Translated by Atsuo Tsuruoka)