The best of Moore

by RICHARD JONES

A SIGNIFICANT exhibition of Australian photographs has been installed in the central Victorian city of Bendigo and will be seen in three other states by the end of August 2008.

David Moore's A Vision, 1927-2003 was opened at the Bendigo Art Gallery this week by Monash Gallery of Art's Emma Matthews who is the education and public programs co-ordinator at Monash in Melbourne.

d moore

Orcades departure, Pyrmount (detail) by David Moore from the exhibition A Vision, 1927-2003

Moore's career spanned more than 50 years and many of his images have become imprinted on Australia's visual memory.

Matthews said Moore embraced the progressive ideas of post-World War 2 photography with its concerns for mastery of design, composition and form.

One of Moore's great passions was to involve as many people as possible in a fuller understanding of photography and society, Matthews said at the exhibition launch this week.

ñIt was with this in mind that following the photographer's death in 2003, the David Moore Estate approached Monash Gallery of Art which has a permanent collection of Australian photography and an extensive touring exhibition programme and invited the gallery to undertake an exhibition and national tour of David Moore's work.

"The exhibition is unique in that it features 100 photographs selected by Moore himself as best representing a photographic career spanning half a century," she said.

The images Moore chose present the gallery goer with a balanced overview of his work encompassing a diversity of subjects, techniques and approaches, Matthews added.

Included in the exhibition are Moore's early naturalistic photos taken on the streets of Sydney, including the iconic Redfern Interior, 1949, - a picture Moore believed he had taken under false pretences.

A woman, facing eviction from her run-down tenement which was scheduled for demolition, invited the 22-year-old into her house. He was carrying his mentor Max Dupain's press-style camera and the Redfern woman mistakenly believed he was a newspaper cameraman. The woman asked Moore to capture in pictorial form her plight and the plight of her extended family.

At this stage of his career Moore had no means of having the pictures telling the story of his subjects published, but the Redfern episode may well have marked the start of his long photo-journalism journey.

The exhibition also includes a group of images which marked Moore's first real experiments into photo-reportage. His freelance shots of the liner Himalaya and its passengers in Sydney Harbour would become Moore's first published photo-journalist story.

He sold it to London magazine Sphere and the picture-story appeared in print in 1951.

By the mid-1950s Moore was receiving regular assignments for Life magazine and the Observer newspaper in what was the peak era for picture magazines.

He was by this time based in London and headed off to assignments in Africa, Europe and the USA. Moore expanded his repertoire with photographs of identities from the arts, entertainment and politics as he became skilled in portrait work.

The photographer returned to Australia in 1958 and continued to take assignments from international magazines while based in Sydney. Indeed, it was on assignment from Time-Life books in 1963 that Moore first got to travel extensively around Australia.

Images in the exhibition show people in outback South Australia, steelworkers in Newcastle, NSW, and cray fishermen from Lancelin, West Australia.

In these photographs Moore shows the Banks family on their cray boat - 23-year-old Peter Banks at the wheel with his brother Barry and father Ron hauling in the pots.

A second picture taken in the bar of the Lancelin pub (130 km north of Perth) shows fishermen Barry Mathews and Bill Johnson in shorts, no shirts, playing pool or billiards. This photograph is entitled Bar Billiards, Lancelin WA, 1963.

There are also photographs of immigrants arriving in Sydney (produced for National Geographic, in 1966) and an aerial view of Sydney harbour, snapped at 16,000 from a light aircraft. From the 1970s on, Moore shifted his focus to a more personal interpretation of the world around him. He explored abstraction in nature, the urban environment and the human form but continued with his portrait work of influential Australians.

The exhibition continues at the Bendigo Art Gallery until September 17. It will be hung at the Shepparton Art Gallery from October 12 to November 26, 2006 and then moves to the Albury Regional Art Gallery from March 16 to April 24, 2007.

From there it can be seen at the Gold Coast City Art Gallery from June 1 to July 29, 2007, the Wollongong City Gallery from October 6 to November 18, 2007 and the Mildura Arts Centre from November 29 2007 to January 20, 2008.

The Moore exhibition's final two destinations will be the Port Pirie Regional Gallery from April 5 to June 5, 2008 and the LaTrobe Regional Gallery in Gippsland, Victoria from June 28 to August 24, 2008.

16 August 2006

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