Carbon Print / Archival Pigment Print.
Carbon Print · Edition of 15
Image: 57 x 42.8 cm / 22 1/2 x 16 7/8 in / Paper: 72 x 56 cm / 28 3/8 x 22 in
Archival Pigment Print · Edition of 5
150 x 200 cm / 59 x 78 3/4 in
Hand-signed by Artist, titled, numbered and dated on print verso
© The Artist
Dried to the colour of old paper, these fan palms have outlived whatever afternoon first cut them, and Sarah Moon photographs them the way one photographs the recently departed — with tenderness and a slight unease. They open like pleated fans, or the tails of birds caught mid-display, several of them rising on thin stems from a glass just visible at the foot of the frame. Nothing here is fresh. Everything is in the long process of becoming something else, and Moon, who has always preferred dusk to noon, lets that process show.
The ground behind them is the real surprise: scratched, stained, printed over with faint marks like the ledger of some forgotten transaction, so that the palms seem pressed between the pages of a book nobody reads anymore. Her print deepens the browns toward black and lends the whole thing the grain of a memory you cannot quite place. It could be a Dutch still life left out in the rain. It could be a page from a herbarium assembled by someone who loved the plants too much to label them.
What stays with me is the patience of it. These leaves were once architecture for the sun; now they are kept, arranged, looked at, and asked to mean something. Moon does not force the meaning. She simply notices that a dead thing, attended to closely enough, goes on giving — and that the camera, like memory, is happiest in the company of what is already half gone.