David Moore

David Moore is a conceptual documentary photographer, whose documentaries a lot of the time seem to involve a governmental/state power theme. David was tauht by the legendary Martin Parr. His work like Parr is more fine art based than commercial as he stated 'Do project and find out where it fit's afterwards' the idea that commercial will follow after. which he said after shooting The Commons porject he recieved three jobs of the back of it because he showed he could use macro and lighting to good effect. 

His first documentary The Velvet Arena in 1995 David attended private views, book launches, business parties taking pictures of the art directors and other attendees, whilst talking about this book David described himself the photographer the person with power and his subject the person without power. Which is true the photographer can manipulate the image however they want for example Don McCullin's shell shocked soldier has been reproduced in different ways firstly where the eyes are visable shows he soldier in it's shell shocked state whereas when the eyes are darkened the picture tells a completely different story where the soldier looks ready to go into battle.  He also described how he feels about hflash stating that useing flash is an assault on the person and that off board flash enchances the drama which it deffinately did in the velvet arena with what could have been potentially boring scenes have now been made interesting with amazing details in the skin and texture of the clothes. 

The second piece of work David talked about was his book the commons again similar to The Velvet Arena with David looking at things in a Macro sense and again using flash but this time without any of the MP's. Whilst talking about this project he firstly let on that the project itself had taken 3 years to gain access to but also when starting a project be very open ended so as not to have an idea until you get there which I guess is true for documentary photography when you do have time to shoot the project as you can go back and assess the pictures you have taken but this is not the case in the fashion world where you only have one chance to photograph the model as you are relying on so many other factors. 

The final project that david talked about was The Last Things a documentary on a Secure military bunker in London, for this project he decided not to use flash as the viewer has never seen this space before he wanted to be more environmental, obviously due to security reasons he had to photoshop certain things out. David decided to publish some of these photographs in the Mail on Sunday over the Guardian as he wanted a larger audience but also because he wanted a audience with less photographic knowledge. David's final piece of advice was that if you are going to photograph institution, community then there are always going to be people who don't like what you are doing or how you are portraying it but you just have to tak it on the chin and keep a clear conscience.