Recommended by my Tutor, Moore (1920-87) turns out to be an intriguing and somewhat overlooked photographer. In an interview with Creative Camera in 1981, he states that he was “drawn to environments in which things shifted … when man clashes with nature” at “the edge of civlisation” (Jeffrey, 1981), which certainly seems appropriate for my Rye Harbour project.
Moore served in the RAF and studied to be a painter, but on graduating in 1947 switched to photography, influenced by Hugo van Wadenoyen’s seminal 1947 Wayside Snapshots book. This was a time where photography was considered more of a craft than an art in Britain, where a living in the field was usually made from fashion, documentary or journalism . Moore’s approach is summed up by two quotes:
“Confronted by the myriad relationships between objects in the visual world, I am impelled to choose or select those happenings that most accurately reflect a state of being at that one moment in time. This choice is governed by an instinctive awareness of the medium’s essential power of translating and recreating in photographic terms. A new world is magically presented in the form of marks made by the optical-chemical process, related to the world of everyday visual contact and yet quite apart from it. From this map of experience, hopefully something of value may be revealed” (Hammans, 2008)
Moore’s approach seems to be close to traditional documentary, rendering landscape and objects in black and white, but by using a photographic way of seeing to suggest relationships between the forms in the frame he transforms the scene into a “the no-mans land between the real and the fantasy” (Hammans, 2008). There is also, for me, a touch of the surreal in some of the work (See Fig. 1 below).
Moore created many wonderful images in this way, but the admiration of his peers did not translate into wider acknowledgement. Moore had a few small one-man shows in London and Wales but more success in the US, which was more receptive to art photography at the time. In 1968 he worked with Minor White at MIT and was further influenced by Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan. Personally I can see a clear similarity with some of White’s coastal edges and Siskind’s abstracts of walls and rocks. Nevertheless Moore states that he is more inspired by music and poetry than photographs. He had his first major solo show in 1970 at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In a BBC documentary Moore asks “why shouldn’t one chronicle an area of ground” and discusses how the “New Topographical” photographers in the US are doing this sort of thing. However for me Moore’s work has something beyond New Topograhics (which can often to my eye seem very flat) – a sense of mystery introduced by the way he uses light and contrast.
Back in the UK he became much more influential as a teacher, although he seems to have continually struggled to balance the need to make an income via teaching at Trent and the desire to do his own work (which did not sell well at the time). Relevantly (when considering the process at OCA) he says of his time at Trent that “there was an over-intellectual approach; everything was measured, plumbed and weighed and this had a bad effect on younger students, who came almost to have a psycho-analyst’s knowledge of themselves” (Jeffrey, 1981).
In 1981 Moore was finally granted a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery.
One reviewer mentions a strange legal problem with his archive meaning that reproduction is not allowed, other than on the internet…? Certainly all his books seem out of print, although the Golden Fleece is an excellent source for Moore quotes and images.
What is interesting is the aesthetic, which is definitely there for me, often in the arrangement of the objects in the frame (“the visual significance and relationship between them that I find exciting” as Moore would put it), but sometimes in the sheer beauty of the light. However apparently for others they are aesthetically absent, lacking in any beauty. Beauty is of course famously subjective, but the issue may also be the subject matter and an appreciation/acceptance of photography’s ability to “raise the common to a state of grace”. (again quoting Moore). “Beauty is a by-product, which arrives without your knowing it” although on this I disagree – there seems to be a moment, as the position and angle of the frame is adjusted to accommodate the objects within it, which speaks to the photographer. Not exactly decisive, which is more of a timing thing, but certainly full of the meaning of beauty even if that cannot be objectively nailed down.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- Moore, R. (1966) Alderney. At: https://the-golden-fleece.co.uk/wp/moore-published-photographs/4/ (Accessed. 19.8.2022)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/raymond-moore-13683 (Accessed 16.8.2022)
- Hammans, R. (2008) Raymond Moore – Between the Real and the Fantasy. Golden Fleece At: https://the-golden-fleece.co.uk/wp/raymond-moore-intro/ (Accessed 16.8.2022)
- Jeffrey, I. (1981) An Interview with Raymond Moore. Creative Camera Republished At: https://americansuburbx.com/2013/01/interview-interview-with-raymond-moore-1981.html (Accessed 16.8.2022)
- Moore, R. (1981) Murmurs at Every Turn. London: Travelling Light. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwsZ3Tgwvgs (Accessed 19.8.2022)
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