Andrew L. Moore has, deservedly, the most illustrious CV of any photographer I have ever come across. He has lecturer, published, given interviews and blogged for the better part of a decade, and you will be hard-pressed to find a single mundane or substandard image in his beautifully maintained website galleries. He has published images in regional collections that show a broad, sensitive cultural nuance in each case - the kind of images that make anyone wonder how in hell he found the scenes he photographed, never mind executed each composition with such casual technical finesse. He explains the process of obtaining access to the hidden niches in his interview with Conscientious Blog : Although one method is to work through diplomatic channels to gain entry to controlled places, my approach has always been to fly below the radar, so to speak. The first thing I try to do is find someone who has the contacts, charm, and curiosity necessary to get things done in a bureaucratic maze, as well as someone who understands what kinds of pictures I'm trying to make. Clearly I should stop narrating before you begin to suspect that I've been paid for such an unashamedly positive review of his work, but aside from a certain lack of close work on human subjects, his galleries really want for nothing.
The same cannot perhaps be said of his films, all of which are available to view in sample size on his website, which would appear promising from the quality of his still work. Confusingly they are, in fact, rather amateurish and pedestrian, full of inappropriate cuts and generic music, but perhaps a point of interest to the curious.
Futebol features small South American children kicking an old ball around to sentimental soundbites and hyperactive drums. Vito, unless it's an exercise in irony, is a rather self-indulgent piece of pretentious w*** feautring an artist chain-smoking and discussing his installation work at the English department of a university: 'what we wanted to do was enclose the existent...spheres...into a kind of...field...of spheres...like an invasion of the killer tomatoes'. Swimmer, Slideshow and Gotham are basically just images with tacky, outdate transitions and irritating music. How to Draw a Bunny, a feature-length documentary on artist Ray Johnson, appears to be characterised by the same irritating pretentiousness, mundane 'creative' dialogue, substandard transition editing and inappropriate music; the film apparently picked up the Special Jury Prize at Sundance 2002, however, so perhaps there's some redeeming quality to the full-length version.
His website is at andrewlmoore.com.
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