Sarah Moon - Vrais Semblants - 1991

Real Semblances
Sarah Moon

Vrais Semblants is one of the most poetic and conceptually rigorous books by Sarah Moon, a cult author and a central figure of international contemporary photography. The volume represents a mature synthesis of her artistic vision, fully situated at the most intimate and recognizable core of her body of work.
Sarah Moon is widely recognized for redefining the boundaries between fashion photography, artistic photography, and visual storytelling, developing a unique language suspended between memory, dream, and time. In Semblants, this pursuit reaches a level of particular intensity: the images do not describe, but evoke; they do not document, but suggest presences, atmospheres, and emotional states.
The book is characterized by a coherent and rarefied photographic sequence, in which time appears fragile, unstable, almost on the verge of dissolving. The subdued work with color, with motion, with grain and printing gives the images a painterly and cinematic aura, a distinctive hallmark of Sarah Moon’s work and the reason why her work is present in the collections of the world’s most important museums and international institutions.
From a collector’s point of view, Vrais Semblants holds particular value owing to the scarcity of Sarah Moon’s bibliography: the author has published a limited number of books, each conceived as an autonomous project rather than a mere collection of images. This makes each volume a rare and highly desirable publication object, especially in the original editions.