Sarah Moon French, b. 1941

We are not told whether this bird is alive. Nothing in the frame will settle it: no cage, no branch, no keeper’s hand, only a flat gray wall behind a creature turned in strict profile. The pale, down-curved bill, ivory shading to a smudge of shadow, dominates the left of the picture, while the head behind it is a mass of near-black feathers, shaggy at the nape. A single round eye, rimmed as if lashed, holds still and gives nothing away.

Photography has always been good at this uncertainty. A camera cannot tell you if a thing breathes; it can only describe surfaces, and surfaces lie with perfect sincerity. Sarah Moon lets the description drift out of focus at the edges, so the bird seems half-remembered, half-invented, closer to an engraving in an old naturalist’s folio than to a zoo snapshot. The title calls it a toucan, though the great casqued beak suggests something else entirely, and the picture is content to leave the argument open.

Moon came to photography from the far side of the lens, having modeled before she began making the blurred, painterly images for which she is now among the most collected of living French photographers. Long associated with Cacharel, she has spent decades treating the medium as reverie rather than record. This is a gelatin silver print, and the process suits the subject: continuous grays, a warm depth in the blacks, an object whose tones were laid down by hand and cannot be reconstituted by any screen.