Sarah Moon French, b. 1941

The bird is the only one looking at us. Its eye, a small yellow coin set in that blue and green head, holds the camera with the flat attention birds have, while the woman — of whom we are given a mouth, a chin, a hand — looks at nothing we are allowed to see. Sarah Moon has cropped away everything that would make this a portrait. What is left is a red mouth, barely parted, and a living creature held up beside it like a word about to be spoken.

The title turns on a familiar French construction, à corps perdu, to give oneself to something without reserve. A mouth given over in that way is a strange thing to photograph, and Moon does not resolve what she has staged. Read one way, the gesture is tender: the bird is brought close, the way one lifts a small animal to speak to it. Read another, it is the mouth that is at risk, the dark beak a few millimetres from the lip. The picture does not choose, and the two readings keep changing places the longer one stays with it.

Everything else is atmosphere doing quiet work. The colour has been drained back to skin and dust, so that only the lacquered red of the lips and the two orange nails answer the green of the feathers; the grain sits on the surface like weather, refusing the clarity a fashion photograph is supposed to deliver. Moon came out of that world and has spent a career leaving it unfinished on purpose. Here she gives us the parts of an encounter — a mouth, a hand, an eye — and lets us assemble the rest, which is another way of saying that she lets us be responsible for what we think we see.