Sarah Moon French, b. 1941

A Magritte logic governs this picture: the body present and abolished at once, the face surrendered to the hat-like clasp of its own arms, so that the dress arrives where the woman should be. But Magritte argues; here nothing is argued. The carbon print, with its bottomless velvety blacks, makes the polka dots into true voids — not painted, not printed, but holes, as if the satin had been punched through to the dark behind the world.

What catches me and will not let me go is lower down, almost a footnote: the small feet. Where the great pale bell of the dress and its hidden weight of black petticoat have made the figure monumental, nearly heraldic against the bruised teal wall, the legs taper to nothing and end in two little shoes with white straps, set close together on the dark floor like a child told to stand still. That detail snags. It turns the grand gown into a borrowed thing, dressing-up, and the whole image tips from fashion toward something tender and slightly frightened.

The general interest — the studium — is plain enough: a couture polka-dot dress, the swing of the skirt, the band of olive light laid across the floor like a horizon. This is Sarah Moon's territory, the fashion image dissolved into reverie, painterly, grainy, half-remembered, made on the instant Polaroid material she coaxed into these unrepeatable carbon prints. One sits in the great private cabinets of fashion photography. Yet what holds is not the dress. It is those obedient little feet, and the face we are not given, the gesture that hides exactly what we came to see.