Inspiration :: Sarah Moon & Deborah Turbeville

I like an image to feel tangible. I like to see elements of age and decay, of the passage of time. At its best, photography can show our memories, the individual and the collective, made manifest. And memory can be a messy, strange thing. Like looking through old family albums, the photographs collected over years and decades, edges torn and images creased by generations of prurient fingers, prodding and turning pages. There's something beautiful in a random assortment of pictures collected over the years, from different cameras, different films. None are quite the same, yet they illuminate a larger idea or form.

I came to Sarah Moon's work first. It was one of the first times I heard the word painterly used to describe a photograph. She seemed to gather colors from a palette others had no access to. Her images felt fantastical, yet lived in. Soft and faded. Comfortable even in their strangeness. I found my first book by Deborah Turbeville much later. The work immediately made me think of Sarah Moon, but it hit much differently. It was darker and more esoteric. She seemed intent on showing an earthier side of beauty. For Turbeville, disintegration and decay felt at the heart of her work.

What I keep coming back to in both is their vision of time. How it seems to move through their pictures, distorting, softening, and ultimately dissolving the very things we often seek to preserve. Sarah Moon's photography always felt more ephemeral to me, Turbeville's living very much on the ground. But I think of these two women as different sides of the same coin, their work fitting together like so many photographs in a family album.