115 - David Moore
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10/16/19 • 75 min
David Moore is a London based photographic artist once described as belonging to "the second wave of new colour documentary in Britain". He has exhibited and published internationally and has work held in public and private collections. David has worked as a photographer and educator since graduating from West Surrey College of Art and Design, Farnham, in 1988 and he is currently the Course Leader of MA Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at the University of Westminster
David’s 2017/18 project ‘Lisa and John’ responds to the archive of his influential 1988 graduation project, Pictures from the real world - which was published as a book in 2011 - and employs theatre, installation, and collaboration. Lisa and John was launched at Format International Photography Festival in 2017, and included a theatrical play, The Lisa and John Slideshow, written and directed by David. The entire Lisa and John Project was exhibited and performed in London and Belfast in 2018 and received widespread acclaim.
Writer, Sean ‘o’ Hagan, wrote: “Moore is such a master of colour that he made me think more than once what William Eggleston's photographs would have looked like had he been born in the north of England rather than the American south.”
David’s current practice addresses agency and a critique of documentary as a genre using installation and theatre as a means posing questions around the production of knowledge through photography.
On episode 115, David discusses, among other things:
HIs formative years growing up in Derby
Why he messed up his exams as a teenager
Being politicised by the music press and the miners strike
Music photography and Management Today magazine being early photographic inspiration
His graduation project, Pictures from the real world
How The Lisa and John Slideshow became a piece of verbatim theatre
Referenced:
Brian Griffin (Ep. 61)
Joel Meyorwitz
Bill Brandt
Ruth Orkin
Lewis Baltz
Paul Searight
Anna Fox
The Echo of Things by Christopher Wright
Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
“When you’re there, there’s an ambivalence, an uncertainty. What carries you is a sort of youthful momentum and a sort of psychological need to make work in this set of circumstances, where you have an idea about what it is you want to do but you can’t say it until you see it. All those things that all people working on open ended project sexperience. The idea of a vision of it, trying to get something but you don’t know what it is...”
David Moore is a London based photographic artist once described as belonging to "the second wave of new colour documentary in Britain". He has exhibited and published internationally and has work held in public and private collections. David has worked as a photographer and educator since graduating from West Surrey College of Art and Design, Farnham, in 1988 and he is currently the Course Leader of MA Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at the University of Westminster
David’s 2017/18 project ‘Lisa and John’ responds to the archive of his influential 1988 graduation project, Pictures from the real world - which was published as a book in 2011 - and employs theatre, installation, and collaboration. Lisa and John was launched at Format International Photography Festival in 2017, and included a theatrical play, The Lisa and John Slideshow, written and directed by David. The entire Lisa and John Project was exhibited and performed in London and Belfast in 2018 and received widespread acclaim.
Writer, Sean ‘o’ Hagan, wrote: “Moore is such a master of colour that he made me think more than once what William Eggleston's photographs would have looked like had he been born in the north of England rather than the American south.”
David’s current practice addresses agency and a critique of documentary as a genre using installation and theatre as a means posing questions around the production of knowledge through photography.
On episode 115, David discusses, among other things:
HIs formative years growing up in Derby
Why he messed up his exams as a teenager
Being politicised by the music press and the miners strike
Music photography and Management Today magazine being early photographic inspiration
His graduation project, Pictures from the real world
How The Lisa and John Slideshow became a piece of verbatim theatre
Referenced:
Brian Griffin (Ep. 61)
Joel Meyorwitz
Bill Brandt
Ruth Orkin
Lewis Baltz
Paul Searight
Anna Fox
The Echo of Things by Christopher Wright
Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
“When you’re there, there’s an ambivalence, an uncertainty. What carries you is a sort of youthful momentum and a sort of psychological need to make work in this set of circumstances, where you have an idea about what it is you want to do but you can’t say it until you see it. All those things that all people working on open ended project sexperience. The idea of a vision of it, trying to get something but you don’t know what it is...”
Previous Episode
114 - Lisa Barnard
Lisa Barnard’s photographic practice is placed in the genre of documentary. Her work discusses real events, embracing complex and innovative visual strategies that utilise both traditional documentary techniques and more contemporary and conceptually rigorous forms of representation. Barnard connects her interest in aesthetics, current photographic debates around materiality, and the existing political climate. Of particular interest to her is global capitalism, the relationship between the military industrial complex, screen based new technologies and the psychological implication of conflict.
Lisa is an Associate Professor in photography and programme leader of the MA in Documentary Photography at The University of South Wales, where she also has PhD students and teaches on the BA in Documentary Photography course. She has published two monographs with GOST books: Chateau Despairand Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden which was funded by the Albert Renger Patzsch Book Award, and nominated for the Prix Du Livre at Rencontres D’Arles in 2015.
Lisa’s latest book, recently published by Mack, is The Canary and the Hammer, an ambitious, complex and wide-ranging project detailing our reverence for gold and its role in humanity’s ruthless pursuit of progress. Photographed across four years and four continents, the project was funded by the Prestige Grant from Getty Images in 2015.
On episode 114, Lisa discusses, among other things:
How teaching keeps her mentally on her toes
Growing up in the Thatcherite heartland of Sevenoaks, Kent
Her work from the San Diego Naval Medica Centre
Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden and how the title came about
Being an adventurist
Why the more conceptual the connection is, the more excited she gets
Her new project about gold, The Canary and the Hammer
Referenced:
The Dollop podcast
Javier Rebas
Gert Van Hesten
Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederick Jameson
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit
Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | The Gold Depository
“One of the things that I say to my students is you can never accept no as an answer. And the photographers that do well are tenacious, unfortunately. You know, if you’re shy it’s much harder to make documentary...
Next Episode
116 - Daniel Meadows
Photographer, documentarian and digital storyteller Daniel Meadows (b. 1952) has spent a lifetime recording British society, challenging the status quo by working in a collaborative way to capture extraordinary aspects of ordinary life through pictures, audio recordings and short movies.
He is best known for his 1973-74 journey around England in the Free Photographic Omnibus when he travelled 10,000 miles in a converted double-decker and made 958 portraits in "free studio" sessions on the streets of 22 different British towns and cities. This is a project he revisited in the 1990s, photographing again some of the subjects of those portraits for his widely published series National Portraits: Now & Then.
His pioneering community storytelling project BBC Capture Wales (2001-08) encouraged many hundreds of people across Wales to embrace the arrival of the digital age in pop-up workshops by making their own two minutes of TV, framing their memories and pictures into digital stories, "multimedia sonnets from the people". Capture Wales won a BAFTA Cymru in 2002.
Daniel taught the documentary photography course with David Hurn in Newport (1983-94); also photojournalism (1994-2001) and digital storytelling (2000-2012) at Cardiff School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies where he also completed his PhD in 2005. In the 1990s he taught photojournalism workshops in the emerging democracies of eastern Europe, also in India and Bangladesh. After 2000 he travelled repeatedly to Australia and the USA lecturing about his pioneering work in participatory media.
His photographs and (more recently) his short films have been exhibited widely both in the UK and on the continent of Europe. Solo shows include the ICA London (1975), The Photographers' Gallery London (1987) and the National Media Museum Bradford (2011). His books include: Living Like This – Around Britain in the Seventies (1975,) Nattering In Paradise – A Word from the Suburbs (1987), National Portraits – Photographs from the 1970s (1997), and The Bus – The Free Photographic Omnibus 1973-2001 (2001).
A detailed and scholarly overview of Daniel’s early work, Daniel Meadows: Edited Photographs from the 70s and 80s by Val Williams, was published in 2011.
His photo-essays done in the industrial north of England in the 1970s are celebrated in the Café Royal Books boxed set edition Eight Stories (2015).
The Daniel Meadows Archive was acquired in March 2018 by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, where there is an exhibition of Daniel’s work entitled Daniel Meadows: Now and Then until November 24th this year, and the accompanying book, Now And Then: England 1970 - 2015, was recently published by the Bodleian.
On episode 116, Daniel discusses, among other things:
His show at the Bodleian library and how they acquired his entire archive.
- His formative experience of boarding school.
- Being taught the science of photography at Manchester Poly. And meeting Martin Parr there.
- HIs Greame Street project.
- Photographing Butlins holiday camp with his friend, Martin Parr - and starting to shoot colour.
- The June Street project, also with Martin Parr.
- His love for digital storytelling and a loathing for ‘antisocial media’.
Memories of his English road trip by double decker bus and of finding some of the people he photographed 25 years later.
- Always thinking his work was 'rubbish' and not feeling a success.
Referenced:
Pete James
Val Williams
Colin Ford
Tracey Marshall
Bill Brandt
Martin Parr
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