(Murray)
(b Sydney, April 6, 1927).
Australian photographer. He was introduced to the creative possibilities of the camera when his father brought home a book on the work of Edward Weston. From 1948 until 1951 he worked in the studio of Max Dupain, where he learnt professional studio techniques during the week, walking the streets with a camera in his spare time. A rigorous apprenticeship refined an inherent aesthetic sensitivity. His growing interest in photojournalism then led Moore to London. He was commissioned by Time, Life, Fortune, Look and The Observer and was also included in the famous exhibition at MOMA, New York, the Family of Man (1955).
In 1958 Moore returned to Sydney, where he specialized in American magazine and industrial commissions, notably with Life Books, National Geographic and Exxon. As the public became sated by photojournalistic essays, and the magazines that published them were undermined by the popularity of television, Moore refined his work; instead of the dramatic situation and the climactic moment, he began, as he said, ‘to look for the ordinary and show how extraordinary and meaningful it is’. In the 1970s, influenced by the coastal landscape of his Lobster Bay retreat, he began to explore form, sensuality and rhythm. Moore’s work has a spontaneous freshness that can transform the otherwise straight picture. He had an unerring ability to capture the underlying forms within his subject and to be sensitive to the relationships of their shapes. Underpinning these strengths is a warmth of feeling for the world and the people that inhabit it, thereby avoiding a cerebral and analytical result....
