The

Roving
Documentarian
ANDREW MOORE SEEKS
SUBJECTS WITH STORIES TO TELL
BY ROBERT KIENER

“We were looking for

something that spoke to
us, something that stood
IMAGES ©ANDREW MOORE / andrewlmoore.com

out from the crowd ...

The minute I saw it, I fell
in love with it”

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 n a warm spring day in 2015,
documentary photogra-
pher Andrew Moore and
friend Lucy Hicks were
driving through dirt-poor
Wilcox County in southwest Alabama.
They were in search of destinations
to photograph for Moore’s upcoming
book on the region, “Blue Alabama.”
“We were looking for something that
spoke to us, something that stood out
from the crowd,” remembers Moore.
“Lucy, who lives in Alabama, had told
me about this old house that had always
intrigued her, so we tracked it down.
The minute I saw it, I fell in love with it.
It was a wonderfully decrepit farm-
house built around 1850. Its exterior of
old pine boards had aged to this deep
brown-black color (previous pages).
It was dark, a little foreboding and
the antithesis of the white Southern
plantation houses you see throughout
Alabama. I sensed there was a story
there waiting to be told.”
The two got out of the car and walked
to the front yard, where Lucy called out
gently, “Yoo-hoo! Is anyone home?”
“We were both a little hesitant,” says
Moore. “It’s not always a great idea to ap-
proach someone out of the blue like this.
It can be a little tricky. You never know.”
After a minute or two, Moore was
delighted to see an elderly but self-as-
sured looking woman climbing down
the home’s back stairway to greet them.
He noticed she had a pistol tucked into
her housedress.
She looked Moore straight in the eyes
and said in her deep Alabama accent,
“Before I talk to strangers, I have to know something.”
She paused for a beat and then asked, “Do you know
the Lord?”
“Yes, ma’am,” answered Moore. “I do.”
“It was an unforgettable moment,” remembers
Moore. “There was this instant connection, a real
bond. I realized she was not like anyone I had ever
met before and obviously she sensed something wel-
coming about me. It was remarkable.”
Moore, a seen-it-all, done-it-all, globe-trotting
photographer from New York City and the 83-year-
old widow Pearlie, a strict no-smoking, no-drinking,

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 no-swearing Southern Methodist, made an unlikely
pair. But, as Moore explains, “We clicked.”
Indeed, Moore made a photo of Pearlie that after-
noon that would eventually grace his book. The
image was of Pearlie playing with her chickens, or,
as she called them, “my pets.” Says Moore, “The un-
adulterated joy in her face blew me away. I am so
glad I could capture that.”
The two became close friends and Moore even
brought his family to Wilcox County to meet her. He
made several more images of her and her home over
the next four years as he kept returning to photo-
graph Alabama for his book. She died earlier this year.
62 PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER
20-YEAR OVERNIGHT SUCCESS
After studying photography at Princeton from 1975 to
1979 under the guiding hand of photographer Emmet
Gowin, Moore worked with commercial photogra-
phers, produced a pre-Photoshop series of montag-
es, and made ends meet by taking various commer-
cial assignments. Eventually he began traveling inter-
nationally and worked on large-format photography
projects in countries as diverse as Cuba, Russia, Bos-
nia, and Vietnam as well as the United States.
He’s exhibited his prints in galleries around the
world, and they’ve been collected by more than 50
museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of
PPA.COM/PPMAG MAY 2022 63
 Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the
National Gallery of Art. In addition to his 2019 book
on Alabama, he’s published seven volumes repre-
senting his work in Cuba, Russia, Detroit, and the
American Midwest. His photos have also appeared
in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York
Times, and National Geographic.
“I’ve been lucky,” says the 65-year-old Moore as he
answers questions in his expansive 3,000-square-foot
studio in Kingston, New York, across the Hudson Riv-
er from his home in Rhinebeck, New York. “Since the
late 1990s I’ve largely been able to finance my travels
and book work by selling limited edition prints in
galleries. I was an overnight success after 20 years
of work! I know how much of a struggle it can be for
photographers. People can have a brilliant project
and then find it’s hard to come back and follow that
with a second success. So, I count my blessings.”   wing it on another trip. In 2007 I booked a month-long
DIVING DEEP INTO A PLACE
While Moore’s relationship with Pearlie is both touch-
ing and interesting, it’s also indicative of how he
works. It illustrates how he finds many of the people
and places that have made his award-winning work
so successful.
It’s not that he dislikes Google, but it’s not his go-to
research method. “I prefer the kind of serendipitous,
person-to-person encounters that force me to get out
into the world,” says Moore. “I’m more of a knock-
on-the-door and a leave-a-note-in-the-mailbox kind
of researcher. I try to go to places you don’t normally
get to see and then work there to build relationships
with both the people I meet and the places I discover.
The first time you go to a foreign place you’ll feel like a
tourist. But the more times you return, you begin to
get deeper as you peel back the layers.”
Sometimes, admits Moore, his style of research
doesn’t work. “I’d done a magazine assignment in
China and thought I had enough sense of the place to
trip and was raring to go. But when I got to northeast
China near the border with North Korea, I quickly
realized that I had no idea what I was doing.”
After a month he returned home, having shot 140

sheets of color negative film with his 8x10 Ebony view
camera. “That’s a lot for me,” says Moore. “But out of
all these there was just one picture I liked. And it was
blurry because the film had popped when it was so
cold. I never showed or printed any of the images—
none of them. The trip was a complete disaster.”
Moore’s book projects can easily take several years
to complete. He’ll return to a place as often as it takes
to get what he needs and typically makes hundreds
of pages of notes as he scouts for photo opportuni-
ties. “I’m kind of like a private investigator—or a spy—
in that I run down a lot of dead ends when I work
on a new project. As a photographer, my goal is to
make intricate, complex scenes that viewers feel they
can step into and lose themselves. I search for the
deep history of a place. Happily, to do that I have the
luxury of time.”
Completing his 2015 book on the Midwest, “Dirt
Meridian” (named for the 100th meridian that bisects
the United States almost exactly in half), required num-
erous trips over 10 years. “One reason I take so long is
that I make a lot of bad pictures before I make a few good
ones,” says Moore with a wry smile. “I am pretty demand-
ing. I want a photograph that works on every level.
The light, the color, the narrative detail—all cylinders
have to be firing before I’m satisfied with an image.”
“The first thing I look for in a picture is how alive
the space is,” says Moore. He points to a picture of
pronghorn antelope in Wyoming from “Dirt Meridian.”
“That scene, with the horizon that seems to recede
forever, could be an endless space. But it is punctu-
ated by the movement of the antelope that is so close
up. That’s where and how this silent space becomes
incredibly activated and alive.”
Using medium- and large-format cameras means that
Moore invariably puts a lot of time and thought into
his images. “I’ve often compared my slow photogra-
phy to slow food in that both take a long time to pre-
pare.” He laughs and adds, “I am always being autocor-
rected by Google when I write about how I ‘make’
a picture. The program invariably changes it to ‘take.’
I don’t take pictures; I make them.”
  After Moore amasses, say, 150 images he’s happy
with, he’ll show them to a book designer, an editor,
or an art director. “It’s important to get another eye,
someone to help edit to create pictures that flow and

64 PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER PPA.COM/PPMAG MAY 2022 65

 also tell a story,” he explains. “This usually occurs
when I am two-thirds or three-quarters into a proj-
ect. That’s the time I can see what’s missing, where
the holes are. I may find I am missing a streetscape
or a small town or a small back road and I can go
back to shoot them. I use the design process to in-
form my shooting.”
He explains that after putting together a selec-
tion of images for “Blue Alabama” he discovered that
while he had plenty of interiors, house exteriors, and
portraits, he needed more landscapes, street views,
and town images. “I lacked variety. Luckily, I hooked
up with a [drone] pilot and was able to capture imag-
es from the air that I needed,” says Moore.

PUSHING FOR MORE

“Sometimes,” says Moore, “but not often, the pho-
tography gods smile down on you.” During the two
years he visited Detroit to complete his book on the
town’s architectural ruins, “Detroit Disassembled,”
he regularly asked for permission to see Henry Ford’s
long-abandoned office in the crumbling Highland
Park Ford Plant. “The building’s owner refused us ev-
ery time we asked,” says Moore. But the determined
photographer never gave up.
“On one visit in 2009, when the owner wasn’t
there, we asked again, and his secretary said, ‘OK,
I’ve got the keys right here. The maintenance man
will take you in.’ We were over the moon. No one had
seen Henry Ford’s office in close to 50 years.”
Moore and his team followed the maintenance
man as they climbed up concrete stairways to the
building’s top floor where the executive offices
were located. “We got to the top floor, located Ford’s
corner office, opened the door and all of us shouted
‘Wow!’ at the same time,” he remembers. The office
of the founder of the Ford Motor Co. was frozen in
time. The wood paneled walls had lost their luster,
mold was everywhere, and a lush carpet of brilliant,
Reprinted from May 2022 Professional Photographer
thick green moss covered the floor.
magazine with permission. “I shouted ‘Don’t anyone walk on it!’ says Moore. He
©Professional Photographers of America • ppa.com/ppmag
spent quite a bit of time making images of the office,
using several setups with different lenses. “I wasn’t
Hover your phone absolutely certain what was the best picture until I saw
camera over the all the negatives together on the lightbox,” he says. His
code for more.
eventual pick, “Model T Headquarters” (page 65), was
named picture of the year by Time magazine and was
More amazing places
by Andrew Moore
acquired by several museums. “It was a miracle,” says
ppa.com/andrew-moore Moore. “It was one of those random, magic moments
when everything comes together.” •

Andrew Moore Robert Kiener is a writer in Vermont.

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