With such grave and masterclass does French photographer Sarah Moon, it is with all revolving dimensions does her conscious stream remit a luminescent urge to capture, to take note and concote the human physicality for which she chooses to refract onto our imperfections and personalities within. In 1970, when she first began to embark on the photographic medium, she has throughout this time rendered images of sometimes extreme harshness, textures of the baron skin being peeled away or the ridges that lay bear because of our tending age. Her images appear everlasting as they hold a non-glamourous value, for that her ability to photograph the misc-en-scene usually with minimal objects and only the context and backdrop she examines and interprets developed stills to have an arcane beauty. As with fashion photographs for Vogue Japan – a woman or female model in her dress made of chiffon with beading or lace denoting of couture. Her images produced for Lanvin’s feature in Acne Paper’s Elegance issue were monochromatic yet rendered out of sync but perpetually distilled in time.

As visually provoking as they are, Sarah Moon’s images always underscore an allegory, and they subvert the character and her own image-making process. In her film darkroom techniques that have seeped in her images of sepia and silver grandules and her experimentation with deeply saturated colour, there are tones of vulnerability and vague expression shown in a photograph for Japanese fashion designer Junya Watanabe in 1998. Created in 1961, a Japanese by the name of Shomei Tomatsu photographed a disintegrated clock watch, apart of the personal belongings of the atomic bombings in Nagasaki. In that split second, peering into the clock’s face dials, all unimaginable destruction would be dislodged within a few seconds.

There is a one strong bondage between Tomatsu’s photograph and Sarah Moon’s mountain of imagery, some of which over her lifetime have been made for royal fashion bloodlines of Christian Lacroix and Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garcons share an aberrational after-effect. Whilst post-modern photographers canvas an image that make an explicit view of the world as their own oyster, Sarah Moon wants us to absorb the facial expressions and body movement as consequential actions leading us somewhere dizzyingly stark or an in-action to speak.

In more recent times, perennial fashion writer Tim Blanks proposed whether Belgian designer Dries Van Noten’s collection was of ‘a disturbed beauty’. It could be a befitting summary for Sarah Moon because as she seeks to direct an image serendipitously, so we come to feel happiness isn’t without moments of sadness, or despair. Nor can mystery not be surrounded by intrigue or ambiguity. Moon’s work is la somme de toutes les parties. The sum of all parts.