Sarah Moon French, b. 1941

A figure stands against black in a dress of green and burnt orange, the skirt lifting and blurring at both sides as if caught turning. Both hands are raised to the face, palms flat across the eyes, the mouth left visible and dark red below them. The legs end in pale shins that seem barely attached to the swirl of fabric above. A red diagonal cuts across the lower right corner. The whole image sits inside a white border with a ragged, irregular edge.

That edge is not a design choice; it is the film. Moon photographed Theresa Stewart in this Issey Miyake dress in 1995 on instant material, and the object she made carries its own manufacture at the perimeter: the coating, the spill, the place where the emulsion stopped. Most fashion imagery of the period was working hard to look immaterial. This one insists it is a thing.

That insistence matters more now than it did then. The picture cannot be separated from its support without losing what it is; scanned and posted, the ragged border becomes a decorative frame rather than evidence of a chemical event. Photographs have always been objects before they were images, handled and kept and worn at the corners. Here the object refuses to get out of the way, and the dress is better for it.