Sarah Moon French, b. 1941

An acid yellow-green fills the frame, wall and floor together, and against it stands a figure in black. A wide hat takes the whole upper face. What is left below the brim is a jaw, a mouth, a little throat. One arm crosses the chest with the hand cupped over the far shoulder. The other gathers a mass of black skirt at the hip. At the very bottom, under all that fabric, a bare foot.

The colour is the first thing to distrust. No wall is that yellow. It is film reacting, a Polaroid emulsion pushed past what it can comfortably hold, and the gown has gone so dense that it stops reading as cloth and becomes a hole cut in the picture. Everything soft here is soft because of chemistry rather than any lens. Her shadow falls across the wall behind her, softer at its edges than she is. What survives is a record of what happened to a sheet of material in somebody's hands.

Which is why the foot matters. It is pale, it is flesh, and it sits on the floor at the bottom of all that engineered dark like a fact that got in by accident. The hat hides the face. The gown hides the body. The emulsion blurs whatever is left over. Then a foot, unhidden, standing on something solid. Sarah Moon builds an apparition out of a dress and a colour, and lets one small piece of a real person hold it to the ground.