‘I always see what is vanishing … Images flit across the face of things and are gone. I wish I could get rid of the feeling sometimes.’ Raymond Moore, Creative Camera, March/April, 1981.
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Towards the end of his life, the English photographer Raymond Moore (1920-1987) became increasingly concerned to realise an idea that had driven him since he first took up photography after beginning a process of giving up on painting in the early 1950s. He thought that what he ought to be doing was finding places or environments that appeared to exist between two conditions; perhaps illustrative of dual realities and possibilities. It was something that would draw him to places where – in a variety of ways – he could find the points where reality and the photographic imagination might meet.
His relocation to Cumbria in the late 1970s, after giving up the teaching career that had financially sustained him for almost three decades, allowed him to spend more time on the often overlooked (and to many, the entirely unknown) Cumbrian coast. In search of ‘signs of finality and the end of time’ he found ‘whole tracts of the Cumbrian coast’ reminiscent of the places around Wallasey in the Wirral – another north west English coastline – where he had grown up.{1} In fact, most of his work was concerned with places on the western margins of Britain – Pembrokeshire, Cumbria, Scotland. In Cumbria, he found a place that might have defined a more profound kind of marginality that extended beyond mere geography and into something almost metaphysical, manifesting itself in that era, which in Cumbria (as elsewhere) was one of industrial decline and social and economic upheaval.
But Moore’s interest in the place was not motivated to document it in any kind of journalistic or political sense. It was, rather, more personal than that. The peculiarities of places he found on the Cumbrian coast was more in tune with his own feeling of detachment from the world of photography and the perception of many that the best that it could aim for was to become primarily a documentary medium. This was something he strongly resisted, and it lends an essential ambiguity to his pictures that befits their concern to become lodged firmly in the artistic sphere. In 1968, Moore was the first British photographer to have his work acquired by a major arts institution, the National Art Collection in Wales. In its 1968 Annual Report, the Arts Council of Great Britain noted the acquisition, highlighting that Moore:
was also the subject of the first exhibition of the work of a living photographer to be mounted by the Council. Sixty-four prints were displayed on specially designed panels with integral lighting. Eric de Maré wrote [in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue]: ‘These photographs by Raymond Moore should dispel forever any lingering doubts about the claim of photography to be an art in its own right.’{2}
Moore’s artistic motivations clearly drew him further into places of deep and abiding interest, but also towards an existence that courted obscurity, something reflected - it could be said - in the work itself. Moore’s pictures capture shifting patterns of light; they seek to arrest the effect that the weather momentarily had on the scenes, figures and objects that took his eye. His images defamiliarise the everyday and reveal – in the play light, in reflective surfaces, in the presence of edges and horizons – something almost akin to escape routes. These were thresholds not only in a literal and topographic sense, but places where the source of those fleeting feelings that drew him closer seemed to be inexhaustible. ‘I go back again and again to the same places’, he said in 1981, ‘even though I make no attempt to repeat what I had previously done.’{3}
Moore’s early work was developed in a time when the idea of photography as an artistic medium was somewhat contested and only beginning to be taken seriously by the major arts institutions in Britain. Even the institutional support that Moore received to help establish photography as a subject at Watford Art School was conditional: it was driven as much by the fact that the discipline could work in support of other established courses – courses in Design, mainly – as much as it was a development made in realisation of the intrinsic artistic possibilities that Moore had himself discovered in photography.{4} His position in the school of art nonetheless provided the basis – and some measure of financial security – from which he could continue to seriously develop his artistic ambitions.
At around this time, in 1959, he was also commissioned by the publisher Gordon Fraser to take images for a series of postcards – similar commissions were also undertaken by Edmund Smith and Eric de Maré – and while the results of this work produced images that were often far from what really interested Moore, they illustrate the fact that many photographers of the era unable to find careers in teaching (as the Royal Academy educated Moore had) would have found more promising careers in undertaking this kind of commercial work.{5}
Flatholm, 1959 (left) and a postcard of Alton Estate taken for a commercial publisher (c. 1959)
The subjects of the postcard work stand in stark contrast to Moore’s work from the same period. One well-known early image, Flatholm (1959), was taken at around the same time as his image of Alton Estate for Gordon Fraser (below). While a great many of Moore’s pictures – devoid of recognisable place signifiers – might have been considered abstracts, Flatholm takes the interest in the play of light and in the kind of rectangular shapes or ‘openings’ (often windows, frames or mirrors) that would recur in Moore’s work over and over to an extreme of abstraction. This image has the quality of visual trickery – of being inside and looking out – and is a foretaste of what was to come in later work, where what we see as viewers is not only what is there, but the implication of something else that may or may not lie beyond or on the other side of whatever is in the foreground.
Thresholds are manifested in the blankness of mist and fog, and perhaps the limits of what can be seen and known, which form excellent vistas into which one can make reality disappear.
For someone who had been so taken by the fugitive nature of the things that took up his interest to the extent that he thought of them as reflections of his own state of mind, it might not be that unusual that Raymond Moore, a pioneer of art photography in Britain, followed the western edge of that country until he ultimately vanished into obscurity. ‘Moore’s land’, as David Brittain wrote in a 1982 piece in Amateur Photography magazine, seemed to consist of places that ‘most of us are relieved to see dwindling in the rear mirror,’ it might just be that through the choices he made, and as far as posterity is concerned, Moore effected his own disappearance. If the subject and the photographer were, as Moore said, almost the same thing, then maybe the qualities of the places glimpsed in those subjects – remote, abandoned, forgotten – was bound to overtake the one who so identified with them. In 1983 Moore moved from Cumbria to Dumfriesshire on the other side of the border separating England and Scotland, a journey of some fifteen miles between Carlisle and Canonbie.{6} He was attracted to the same sense of desolation and remoteness that had detained him in Cumbria. In the photographs from around this time, those that were published seem often to have roads, meeting points and structures positioned precariously at some real or imagined edge as subjects. The thresholds here are manifested in the blankness of mist and fog, and perhaps the limits of what can be seen and known, which form excellent vistas into which one can make reality disappear.
It has been written on many occasions that Moore, although one of the most well-regarded of 20th century British photographers in his day, is now – like those places that so interested him – almost unknown. In the last year of his life, The Guardian reported in 1990, interest had dwindled to the extent that he only sold two prints.{7} By 2012, on the occasion of a major retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that featured some of his work, he had become, one reviewer noted, ‘the most sadly neglected of all British photographers.’{8}Yet his work has been included in numerous publications surveying the history of photography and is held in major collections in the UK and the United States.{9} These are facts that reveal the importance that was once attached to his work. But, on the other hand, it is certainly true to say that with the passage of time, it becomes difficult to make contact with his pictures simply because of the fact that they are not – not even a substantial portion of them – held in any one accessible place or archive. Nor are they easily available in the form of books and other publications.
A page spread from Creative Camera Yearbook 1977 in which Moore spoke about the guiding ideas that shaped his approach to photography. On the right, ‘Untitled 1969’, shows Moore’s preoccupation with edges and thresholds.
In the early 1980s Moore was asked how successful he thought his work was. His response was to suggest that there were ‘maybe half a dozen pictures’ that he thought stood the test of time; most of the rest he thought were ‘failures of one sort or another.’{10} It was perhaps this kind of attitude, part of his striving for a kind of perfection, that left him unconcerned about organising an archive. When he passed away attempts were made to catalogue his work, and to seek out an institutional buyer – perhaps a university, or someone capable of assigning the resources to managing the archive – to look after it. For a number of years Sotheby’s in London, acting as broker for a sale, held much of his work, and it was loaned out for exhibitions here and there.{11} Today, his pictures seem to all intents and purposes to be lost, with attempts to find a buyer for his archive in the years following his death ultimately unsuccessful. In my own research, I have found negatives for sale on eBay, and corresponded with gallery and museum curators who have been likewise trying to find out what happened to his work.
Moore spent a lot of time working on the development and printing process – which is arguably another reason why so many images remained undeveloped and unorganised – and was a stickler for doing whatever was necessary to get the right results. It is doubly unfortunate that the most readily available examples of this work now are to be found either in a random assortment of second-hand books and photography magazines or in very low-quality online versions. The extent to which Moore is neglected seems to stand in inverse relationship to the position he had once been accorded in the history of photography (enter some of the text from the cut sections of earlier in the first version). Besides those images collected in the books published in his lifetime, Murmurs at Every Turn (1981) and Every So Often (1983) – both of which are expensive to obtain on the second-hand market – there is not much else: no biographies or book-length treatments of his work that might reveal it within the broader context of his life and times and making use of the best of what print publishing can offer today.
Murmurs at Every Turn (London, 1981)
Moore once said that what interested him were things that provided ‘visual equivalents to feeling’:
the strange, suggestive forms of rock and sand, the brooding presence of landscape and the almost surrealist interiors of old buildings […] I am quite unable to explain why I choose particular objects in preference to others, it's like asking a musician to explain or justify a series of notes.{12}
The subjects of these pictures can seem, on first view, quite banal, but looking at these pictures for longer, and looking more closely, pays off in unexpected ways. Soon enough the visual language, the tone quality, and the atmospheres that interested him become rise out of the pictures and begin to make the mundane and everyday just a little bit stranger, perhaps even more ‘extraordinary’ in its revelatory potential.{13}
Notes
1 Ian Jeffrey, ‘Ray Moore Talking’, in The Art of Photography, 1839-1989, ed. Mike Weaver (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 367.
2 Annual Report and Accounts of the Arts Council of Great Britain (London, 1968), p. 54.
3 Jeffrey, ‘Ray Moore Talking’, p. 368.
4 See Simon Stahli, ‘Dwelling in Contingency’, PhD thesis, University of Wales, Newport, 2009, pp. 76-77.
5 ‘Mr. Raymond Moore’ (obituary), The Times, 09 Oct. 1987, p. 20.
6 For more detail about this period, see Stahli, ‘Dwelling in Contingency,’ pp. 105-106.
7 Eamon McCabe, ‘Capturing Beauty in the Back of Beyond,’ The Guardian, 17 September, 1990, p. 38.
8 The exhibition was titled ‘Island Stories: Fifty Years of Photography in Britain,’ held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. See Hodgson, “Industrial Strength Images.”
9 See, for example: Badger, Through the Looking Glass; Clarke, The Photograph; Haworth-Booth, The Land; Jeffrey, The Photography Book; Stevenson and Forbes, A Companion Guide to Photography in the National Galleries of Scotland; Weaver, The Art of Photography 1839-1989.
10 Jeffrey, ‘Ray Moore Talking,’ p. 368.
11 McCabe, ‘Capturing Beauty in the Back of Beyond,’ p. 38.
12 In Creative Camera, November 1968, quoted in Stahli, ‘Dwelling in Contingency,’ p. 282.
13 Liz Wells, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity. (London, 2011), p. 168.
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[Note - this text contains unused material from early drafts of a rather different article, titled ‘Raymond Moore’s Uncertain Places’ that is currently in press and will be published by the journal Photographies in 2021/22]