David Moore, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

David Moore: the unseen images
The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
7 November 1997 - 18 January 1998

David Moore is Australia's most significant living photographer. This exhibition celebrates his 70th year. David Moore's career was forged at the high point of international photojournalism. He was assigned by Life, Time, Fortune and The New York Times in the U.S. and The Observer in the U.K.. He photographed the building of the Sydney Opera House in the 1960s and the Glebe Island Bridge in the 1990s. He has worked in many parts of the world and published eight books of photographs.

David Moore's accumulated archives now amount to more than 200,000 images. The breadth and depth of his working life, over 50 years, has produced an extraordinary collection of material which documents facets of life in Australia and the United States as well as events in Britain.

This exhibition consists of a selection of 87 photographs that have not been seen before by the public. They represent a wide variety of David Moore's working life. Included are pictures of politicians and artists, people in remote regions, urban design, landscape, the rich fabric of daily life and personal observations which illustrate a continued search for expression and communication. A fully illustrated catalogue published by Chapter & Verse accompanies the exhibition. David Moore and Judy Annear, Curator of the exhibition, will discuss the unseen images on Friday 14 November within the show.

There is a thread which joins these photographs regardless of whether they are black & white or colour, or whether they were taken in the 1950s or forty years later - it is the photographer's ongoing fascination with the structure of the image within the frame: its geometry, and, within that geometry, the relationship between all the elements depicted, no matter how small they may be.

David David Moore's modernist stance in photography is the overriding aspect of this exhibition. From a very early stage in his career the impulse to formalism and abstraction in his work is quite clear. While there are images of spontaneity and intimacy in some of the early photographs, it is in the patterns of light and shade over form, particularly architectural and natural from, which becomes paramount in his work.

David Moore has been instrumental in advancing Australian photography throughout his career and in the early 1970s was instrumental in setting up the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney. In 1994 he was awarded an Australian Artists' Creative Fellowship. He has exhibited in London, Paris, China, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and New Zealand, as well as throughout Australia. His work is included in major collections throughout the world, for example, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, le Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C..

THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney NSW 2000
www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au