David Moore (photographer)

Moore died on 23 January 2003 of oesophageal cancer at a private hospital in Longueville, New South Wales, aged 75. A major retrospective of his life and work opened at the National Gallery of Australia two days later, assembled from prints from Seven Years a Stranger donated by Moore in 1983, augmented by a complete set of later prints acquired by the Gallery from Moore’s retrospective at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1976, and later purchases and gifts from the photographer, and his gift of all the 35mm colour transparencies and monochrome prints for In the Making.

In August 2001, Timothy Fairfax and Gordon Darling gave $44,000 to the National Portrait Gallery to purchase works for a substantial holding of Moore portraits, with the remainder donated by the artist himself. Darling said, ‘I have always admired David Moore’s work and his ability to capture the moment with his photographs,” while Simon Elliot elaborates on “Moore’s skill as a portrait photographer and his love of the captured moment, accident and chance, combined with strong formal compositional devices.”

The first retrospective of Moore’s work, held in 1977 at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, was acquired by the Australian National Gallery (now renamed the National Gallery of Australia).

He contributed energetically to research into historical Australian photography, making in 1976 an archive of gelatin silver prints from the collection of Henri Mallard’s glass negatives that were published in association with Sun Books in 1978, and from 1979, researching Australian photography for a book Australia, Image of a Nation 1850-1950, that was published in October 1983.

Moore participated in, and judged, photographic exhibitions throughout his career. In the 1970s Moore developed non-commissioned works aimed at capturing what he called “the soft flow of time”, as opposed to the “decisive moment” favoured by magazine editors. Much of such work by him was exhibited in commercial galleries.

During the 1970s he was an influential figure in the development of art photography, and as a dedicated advocate for the acceptance of photography as a legitimate art form was a driving force, with Wesley Stacey, behind the establishment the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney.

Commentator Craig McGregor regarded Moore as amongst a few who had “made the crucial breakthrough in Australian photography”. Photographs by him were purchased, with those of David Beal, Helmut Gritscher, Lance Nelson and Richard Woldendorp in 1969 for the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne through the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund. In December a group show of these works was held, the first representation of photography at the new National Gallery of Victoria quarters in St Kilda Road. Moore’s 1966 photograph Migrants Arriving in Sydney, originating from a commission by National Geographic, is regarded as an iconic work of modern Australian photography.

Throughout his career, Moore made portraits of significant Australians and international personalities, either in formal sittings or more often as part of his reportage, and many as part of his contribution to journalist and provocateur Craig McGregor’s 1969 cultural survey In The Making.

After the birth of twins in August 1960, Moore diversified the commercial applications of his photography; his semi-abstract murals depicting the four elements fire, earth, air and water decorated the dining room in the refurbishment of the Carlton-Rex Hotel in Sydney; and large panels of Moore images were exhibited at the Australian stand at the Comptoir Suisse at the Palais de Beaulieu, in Lausanne, which was attended by an audience of over a million. He joined forces in establishing a studio in a North Shore terrace house at 100 Walker Street with designers Gordon Andrews and Harry Williamson, then at 7 Ridge Street North Sydney in a building designed and then also occupied by architect Ian McKay. Thus they gained more exposure, sometimes working together on commissions such as the Tokyo Trade Fair, and the 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Perth, Western Australia. in the estimation of historian Gavin Souter the group “helped change the creative climate in Australia.”

Moore was early recognised as a significant practitioner. In a 1959 review his Slum Kids is favourably compared with his employer Dupain’s Meat Queue in a review of a group show alongside Laurence Le Guay at David Jones Gallery.

The couple returned to Australia on RMS Orion, 2 August 1958, the year of his father’s death in December, in time for the opening of a solo exhibition of Moore’s work at Macquarie Galleries, He contributed picture stories to local publications including Walkabout, but continued to be commissioned by, and sell existing work to, American and British magazines, represented by the New York-based Black Star photo agency from 1958.

Another early image, also made while apprenticed to Dupain, of a struggling family in working class Redfern was included in Edward Steichen’s major 1955 exhibition “The Family of Man”, which originated at the Museum of Modern Art and toured the world. In a newspaper article Moore corrected the misinformation that he was the only Australian with work in the show–Laurence Le Guay had been miscredited by MoMA as being a New Guinea photographer.

Moore married West Australian Jennifer Flintoff in 1955 while they were both in London, he freelancing and she teaching in the East End, and they had four children, Karen, twins Lisa and Matthew, and Michael. They divorced in 1968.

Despite being offered a junior partnership with Dupain, Moore moved to London in 1951, where commissioned work appeared in The New York Times, Time, The Observer, Fortune, Life, Look and other publications and undertook commissions in the USA, Europe and in Africa, including accompanying the Royal Tour in Nigeria in 1956. Moore married Jennifer Flintoff in 1955.

In 1947, having begun studies in architecture, Moore decided on a photography career, which he began in the advertising and illustration studio of Russell Roberts in Sydney. He joined the Institute of Photographic Illustrators formed in Sydney in 1947 as ‘the first group of specialised cameramen [sic: Margaret Michaelis was the only woman member] to be organised as a society in this country’. Moore was amongst fifteen exhibitors, mostly Sydney professionals, in the first exhibition in 1949. He moved on to work with Max Dupain, whose work he respected as “clean…very informative, very strong, very emotional – a world away from the soggy pictorial stuff.” Working in Dupain’s studio from 1948 until 1951 on architectural, commercial and industrial assignments, in his own time Moore made excursions to photograph the foreshores, harbour and city of Sydney, as well as making pictures its slums, on which Harold Cazneaux commented in Contemporary Photography, in the course of which he made the much-reproduced Redfern interior, of a family facing eviction. Moore’s work started being exhibited and published, in 1948 when he was 21, with a double page spread in a 1950 Sunday supplement of The Sydney Morning Herald being devoted to his series on the preparation of an ocean liner for its return journey to the UK, and inclusion in a book Australian Photography.

Moore was educated (1933–39) at Tudor House primary school when, at age 11, he was given a Coronet box camera, before graduating to Kodak 1A folding camera, given to him by his father who inspired his son’s interest in the medium when he brought home a book on the work of Edward Weston. With it he photographed a fellow student and future Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, sailing a toy yacht and as an illustration in the school’s The Tudorian it was his first published work. He also used it to make a self-portrait aged 15, while undertaking his secondary studies at Geelong Grammar School 1939-1945.

Moore was born in Vaucluse, Sydney, Australia, the younger brother of Tony, the two children of Casiphia Dorothy (née Morton) who died in 1931, and architect and artist John D. Moore who on 23 June 1932 married their step-mother, the artist Gladys Mary (née Owen) OBE at St Michael’s Anglican Church, Vaucluse.

David Moore (6 April 1927 – 23 January 2003) was an Australian photojournalist, historian of Australian photography, and initiator of the Australian Centre for Photography.