John Moore

We rode every summer over the mountains from Tennessee to North Carolina and South Carolina to see family. Sometimes we just went to the mountains. I was very young.

At that time on the Esso road map, the Great Smoky Mountains were a big dark green space, with only one blue road through it. Stops along the way for picnics and short hikes, trails dripping wet, out the window of the car forests and big mountaintops of green just like on the map, loud water flowing over rocks. That map and those mountains were very mysterious and exciting. 

Later, in the 1960s we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we traveled on weekends and on extended trips around California. The idea of taking photographs was introduced to me

at an early age by my Dad. He had a nice Rollei 35mm camera and would take photographs of our travels. Those trips and outings, all great adventures taken during my grade school years, had a profound influence.

Sometime during the early 1970s I bought a book that in retrospect changed my life. ‘Appalachian Wilderness, the Great Smoky Mountains’ by Eliot Porter and Edward Abbey, was the first book of photographs I owned. I found an immediate connection with both the photographer and author. I studied Porter’s images, and sought out other books by Porter and Abbey, which led me to still other photographers and writers. This was the start.

Statement regarding landscape photography

Prepared for a Corrigan Gallery Exhibit
Charleston, South Carolina 2007

“ In just about any profession, craft, or trade, one begins by learning, watching, following a mentor, the mentor being the person you work with every day, or someone whose work you admire and study in books, museums, or in the space this person has worked.  Everybody knows this. 

I spent a good part of my childhood in Northern California, and we went places, mostly places my Dad would take us which were at the end of the road, over the next hill and right around the bend.  He also took a lot of photographs of us and what we saw, and my family treasures them.

So, in college in North Carolina, I found myself in the Sierra Club, in the woods, and looking at photographs in books and magazines taken by the great conservation photographers Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. And others.  And others, still, that took photographs of all sorts of things that interested me. I started taking photographs. 

Then I went to Seattle for some school, and that city, and every place around, was like the other side of the world.  And like most people, when you travel you often see things in a different way.  There, in a massive landscape of mountains off the scale of my experience and forests deep and dark, which all together are often every shade of gray, I took note of the bits and pieces of strong color that were close at hand.

Ever since then, that has been the way I see.  Color floating in fields, the mysteries of black, the warm against the cool, the screaming late afternoon and evening light in spots here and there.  I think it has turned out to be an appropriate way to see the mountains of North Carolina and the swamps of the South Carolina Lowcountry, places where I spend most of my photography time, and places where the close at hand is, to my eye, more interesting than the whole. ”

Sometime during the 1990s this attention to the close at hand became an obsession with small scale images of worlds both natural and man-made not usually seen by others. These photographs became more two dimensional and more abstract,

influenced by my fascination with abstract expressionist paintings from the 1950s and on by Richard Diebenkorn and others, and locally by William Halsey.  

Statement regarding abstract photographs

Prepared for an exhibit at the Charleston City Gallery, titled Rust Never Sleeps
Charleston, South Carolina 1997

“ I was on a camping trip in the mountains photographing with a friend, and we stopped by a bridge over a stream. I was not able to see anything to photograph about the stream, but the bridge was of interest. The closer I looked the more interesting it became. It was a steel bridge, with large gusset plates and varying patterns of rivets on the plates. Many of the surfaces had rusted and had been marked by graffiti. I had recently seen an exhibit of William Halsey’s paintings at the College of Charleston, and also had become interested in Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings. These images undoubtedly were in the back of my mind when I started photographing parts of the bridge. Rust and graffiti are easy targets for photographers, and I could not stop myself. Small pictures can become large worlds when you are looking through the view finder of a camera.

The title of the series, ‘Rust Never Sleeps’, is of debatable origin, however the phrase was popularized by Neil Young who took it out of a song by the group Devo, and put it in a song of his own. On that trip to the mountains we were all there by the fire; Neil Young, William Halsey, Richard Diebenkorn and me. ”

I still spend as much time as I can in the outdoors, usually alone, taking photographs. I also seek out ‘local color’ in the built environment, especially places rich with color and texture in the details. The two experiences seem to complement one another, and I would not have it any other way. 

This website was set up to show how my photography has evolved over a long period of time.  I broke the years chronologically into three parts, which coincide with using three different camera systems. That does not mean the work is entirely dependent at all on camera technology. There is a good bit of overlap between the three parts, as you will see. I am the least technically savvy, gear-oriented photographer I know.

However, each camera system has had its differences as to what it enables you to do, and I think that is evident in this body of work. 

The website is also somewhat of an archive and a place to present an ever growing number of new photographs. I plan to add and remove images, new and old, as time goes by to reflect the ephemeral qualities of technology and the ephemeral nature of the places and things I photograph. In that sense, the images as here presented are a snapshot taken right now of my work over many years, and both old and new images added will change that snapshot over time. Ephemeral. A nice word.

See resume for additional information.

Technical Notes

Since I have made it a point to break the work into periods of time where different technology was used, some explanation is deserved. Here are a few specifics:

In 1975 I bought an Olympus OM-1 35mm camera. OM-1’s were somewhat new at the time, they were smaller and lighter than other SLR cameras, and their lenses were considered as good as Nikons and Leicas. They were simple and elegant in design, basically an all-mechanical camera with an electronic exposure meter that you could turn on or off. I learned how to take photographs with that camera. I had only one lens for a few years, a semi-wide 35mm. I added lenses later. In 1984 I bought a newly released OM-4. That camera had a built-in spot meter, which was pretty handy. The meter was so good I used it for my 4x5 exposures until 2010. During this period of time I used Kodachrome 25 color transparency film, then the gold standard for color landscape photography, until 1987 when I realized what I was seeing, at least in my mind, was more like Fujichrome Velvia transparency film. I then began my tenure with Fujichrome eyes.

I noticed in the mid to late 1990s that the images I saw were growing more complex, with more detail in them than could be adequately captured on 35mm film. A couple of friends told me I

took photographs in method and in look that deserved a 4x5 field camera. So, in 2000 I bought a Toyo, all metal, 4x5 field camera, with one lens, a fabulous Schneider picked out to simulate the view my favorite first Olympus 35mm lens afforded me. I began the onerous task of viewing through the camera an upside down and reverse world and of cloaking myself with a dark cloth. I stayed with Fujichrome Velvia, then in sheets conveniently packaged as ‘quickload’, saving me the great trouble of loading sheets in holders in a house full of hair and dust from three cats and one dog. 

I bought my first digital camera in 2007, a Nikon D8 with a zoom lens as a grab shot and travel camera. That opened up a new world for me, as I was so accustomed to seeing one view for seven or so years. In 2010, or thereabouts, Fuji discontinued manufacture of the 4x5 ‘quickload' sheets. Since then, my Toyo sits in a box awaiting an affordable digital back, which may never happen or need to happen.

In 2012 I bought a Nikon D800, their best digital camera at the time for the photography I was doing. That remains my camera to this day, despite having the top broken off in a tequila induced run and hop on top of Colorado River rocks in the Grand Canyon in 2014. The riverside repair of black electrical tape and rubber bands remains. The camera still works.