Where Things Are Both Falling Apart and Beautiful, An Interview With Photographer Andrew Moore

By Jenny Wonderling | December 12, 2023

Story by Jenny Wonderling

In 2019, after almost four decades as a renowned photographer in New York City, Andrew Moore moved his studio to the refurbished industrial Fuller Building in Kingston. The Covid pandemic hit the following year, curtailing his work and travels globally. While deepening his connection with the Hudson Valley, he focused his lens on his immediate surroundings. “I went back to nature and slowly my pandemic project became about taking stock, working closer to home, exploring and returning to something simpler, yet at the same time seeing the layers of history, the work of the Hudson River School painters, and the intersection of photography and painting,” Moore notes. The result of that deep plunge is Whiskey Point and Other Tales, his newest body of work now on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery from November 16th – January 6th.

Andrew Moore’s images converge in a liminal space between loss and beauty, mystery and irony. Each sumptuous photograph seems to encapsulate an entire world that is at once painterly and cinematic, where rich palettes and scenes hint at complex stories just out of reach. His work celebrates places in transition, holding whispers of what was and a lament for what will never again be while leaving the viewer curious and transfixed. Meanwhile, his images are not bleak; they merely help us take notice of what might otherwise be forgotten or overlooked. He explains, “We need beauty in our lives one way or another. We need beauty in our lives if we’re going to persist.”

The lushness of peeling paint, the decayed elegance of antiquities, sun-beaten dilapidated barns, and barren fields and farmhouses hold the hauntings of former vibrance, forgotten eras and ways. There is a stillness, an eerie magic and evocative melancholia. Through his dreamy spaces or rewilded natural landscapes, we just might question the merits of our disposable world or better understand that things may not be what they seem. The ruins of his lens are tender observations, reminders to covet the chapters of lost history of which he is so fond. Erudite and passionate, with an easy laugh, Andrew is more hopeful and cheery than his photos might suggest at first glance. He commemorates beauty on the verge of its demise, a beauty that is sophisticated and insistent, suspended at the moment just before modernization’s impact. Within his worlds, we remember to look backward with renewed, unexpected hope about the role art plays in helping us move forward in a better way.

Henry Ford’s Detroit office at the time he was fabricating the Model T

INSIDE+OUT: Andrew, can you share about your move to the Hudson Valley?

Andrew Moore: I moved from New York City five years ago, but I’ve been coming Upstate for decades. I had a very busy but small studio on 27th Street, about a quarter of the space of what I have here. I’m really happy and surprised by all that Kingston has to offer. There’s so much going on here!

I do feel like there are all these interesting people here, but it’s not like the city, where you bump into people all the time. So I’ve started a kind of meetup; every month, about ten photographers come here and share their work. It’s a critique group to bring new personal work. We get together, have beers, pizza, and whatever, and then everybody gets a turn to show their work, but not commercial work. We’ve just had our fourth meeting and it’s been a great use of this space and a great way to meet people.

So you feel like the jump to country life has been beneficial?

I still miss the city, I have to say, and I still like going into the city almost every week. I see my friends, have lunch, and take the train home or stay over at my son’s home. There are things that I do miss about the city, the spontaneity of things and lots of activities. But being up here, I’ve been able to focus on my younger kids a bit more who are in middle and high school, focus on my work, as well as building a community of friends. I’d say overall, it’s been good, but it’s taken a long time to find the latter.

Does your wife like being up here?

She loves it! She’s a textile artist and educator, her name is Kati Lovász (IG: @kateandrosepatterns). She works with embroidery and sustainable sewing, using folk art techniques and practices she learned while growing up in Hungary, where she’s originally from. She found here a lot of what she couldn’t in the city. She now teaches locally and online; she’s taught at the Sheep and Wool Festival and has items in stores in Catskill, Kingston, and Hudson.”

What helped you connect with the area and how has it changed your work?

We moved up here in the summer of 2019 and I had this space from the beginning. Then, obviously, the pandemic happened. I’m usually traveling for work, so instead, I got to immerse myself in this region. I have this wonderful assistant, Ryan Rusiecki, and we have been exploring the Hudson Valley from Beacon to Albany, just the whole thing, driving around, talking to people. Because everybody was home during the pandemic, we started knocking on doors and leaving notes in mailboxes. And they call you back! So that’s how we started an exploration of where I live, what this place looks like, and all these towns and the feel of each. But at a certain point, I felt that rather than doing a kind of “Detroit on the Hudson”, which a lot of people had already done, I wanted to deep dive into what’s unique about this place: the atmosphere, the tides, the conditions, the rivers, the physical beauty of it, which appealed to the Hudson River School, and then to kind of remake all that in terms of a landscape photograph.

The thing with photography is that ever since the ‘70s, with the New Topographics, the American landscape has been viewed with a certain kind of irony or detachment, as though a tainted or poisoned or suburbanized landscape. You don’t have romantic landscapes of America in the same way as we once did. Or if you do, they’re seen as very kitsch.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) explains this wave this way: “A turning point in the history of photography, the 1975 exhibition New Topographics signaled a radical shift away from traditional depictions of landscape. Pictures of transcendent natural vistas gave way to unromanticized views of stark industrial landscapes, suburban sprawl, and everyday scenes not usually given a second glance.”

So I think my work embraces a certain painterly tradition as well as a romantic tradition. But also, they are photographs about making photographs. As Stanley Kubrick said, “You’re not trying to capture reality. You’re trying to capture a photograph of reality.” I think that these pictures are very self-aware in terms of their references and their antecedents. I want each scene to be activated in some way: there’s a train, birds, animals, people, even the flora appears animated… so the pictures aren’t at all about the passivity of nature, but just the opposite, as I want to express, in each scene, the radiant totality of a living moment…

Each of your photos seems to tell a whole story, yet some of the details feel out of reach. As the viewer, it is easy to be curious and want to know more. Can you tell us more about what lies behind some of the images in the Hudson Valley series? Is there much more than meets the eye?

Let’s take the photograph of “Whiskey Point,” for example. At first glance, you see a magnificent riverfront scene, these trees and beautiful clouds. If you look carefully, though, you can notice remnants of Kingston’s 19th-century and early 20th-century industry because it was a center for brickmaking. There are lots of old piers, bits of docks, scattered bricks, and so forth. In fact, it is a kind of ruin. This nature scene actually depicts a second growth because all the trees had been previously cut down. So what looks like a kind of pristine wilderness is, in fact, a kind of rewilded nature. I love that things are not what they seem to be in that picture.

And then in an artistic tradition, like, let’s say, The Hudson River School, you’d have an artist or someone like a wanderer like this figure, creating a sense of scale. Here you have a photographer, which is also a kind of nod to the pandemic, with all those people going out into nature and taking pictures, although never really looking at them. Wim Wenders said once, “The trouble with iPhone pictures is nobody sees them. Even the people who take them don’t look at them anymore, and they certainly don’t make prints.”

So I wonder how the role of photography has changed. It’s become this universal language, with billions of pictures being made all the time. Yet the photograph has become a kind of tool for saying, “I’m here.” I don’t even know if I have the right words for it, but it’s no longer about looking at something. It’s about saying I was here. When I see a person holding up a camera, oftentimes, they’re not looking outward; they’re actually just taking a picture of themselves.

A theme that runs through a lot of your pictures has been decay. That’s interesting, considering we’re in a culture that’s often in denial of the dark and death, or it’s hidden away. When did you start having those sensibilities and why?

Without getting too Freudian about the whole thing, I did have a relative, Silas Stone, who was my great-great-grandfather and made money in the real estate market in Cleveland back in the 19th century. He bought up river bank land in Cleveland that nobody wanted at the time but later was part of the valuable industrial area called the Flats. His granddaughter, Georgia Stone, was an heir and lived in hotels in Dresden, Berlin, and Paris, and finally ended up as a recluse in Hartford. She had all this money in the bank, but she went crazy and, in the end, was alone. At one point, her dog died and she simply rolled up the dog in a carpet in her house. My parents were the executors of her estate. They went to her house and found that dog skeleton inside a carpet.

This woman who had been so wealthy, summered in Newport, and had all these beautiful things, yet died from starvation in this mansion in Hartford. I think that made a big impact on me as a kid. How can we live in this kind of world of comfort, but right around the corner is the potential for it all to go wrong? My parents had this very strong belief in security and caring about the neighbors, but I never believed in that. I was interested in the opposite: What happens when all that security falls away?

Did you ever live the “struggling artist’s” life?

I lived in an unheated basement and stuff like that in my 20s and didn’t have much money. However, knowing about my relative and the stories about her provided me with a kind of awareness about luxury and the pursuit of wealth. So, from the beginning, I was interested in places where things are both falling apart and beautiful at the same time, where there’s joy and there’s sadness. This kind of emotional complexity is what’s always appealed to me in a picture. I think that’s interesting for a viewer too, where you’re presented with conflicting emotions in an image. Rather than being told what to feel, what to do, or what to look at, I’m always trying to leave space in my pictures for the viewer to have these different emotions happening at the same time and to have to find their way. So it’s not just about decay. It’s more like the definition of melancholy, where you have sadness and beauty together.

“Rather than being told what to feel, what to do, or what to look at, I’m always trying to leave space in my pictures for the viewer to have these different emotions happening at the same time and to have to find your way.”

A friend who helped me in Russia paid me one of the greatest compliments. He said, “You know, I used to look at my country and never see anything beautiful about it. And now, having worked with you, I see beauty.” That always really touched me.

Your work seems to honor the past. What would you tell your children, or your children’s children, about why it might be important to preserve or at least honor places that might otherwise be overlooked in our modern, fast-paced world?

First of all, the kinds of places that I’m interested in are often very ephemeral. They often don’t last very long because when something starts to fall apart in this country, it’s either torn down or renovated. I like to linger in that kind of in-between state where a place is kind of occupied, but not really, kind of used, but not still habitable…but maybe not for long. Those are very transitory places, so I would say they should be honored or valued for their brevity, as the beauty of those things is very short-lived. I wouldn’t say they have a lesson, per se, but they are things that embody the past and can be read almost like a novel. I mean, these places have had many lives, a series of chapters. In the world where we live now, everything’s so flattened out, so those things are to be valued and experienced.

In one of your images, you capture a church that had been a soap factory and was then turned into a kid’s theater…

Yes, I love places like that. I love places that have “chaptered” lives. Someone once said something to the effect of, “Architecture is a kind of witness to history. It may not always be fully reliable, but it does bear all the traces of the past and lives lived in it.” That’s my own adapted version of a quote by Octavio Paz.

I think there’s an eternal fascination with things like the creepy house at the end of the street where we don’t know who lives there anymore; there’s a kind of fear and fascination for those kinds of enigmatic places. In fact, I think we need more enigma, more of the mysterious, which is the very opposite of corporate speak and culture.

Do you remember the first place that made you stop and take notice, which elicited a sense of awe and that mystery that you describe?

I didn’t travel that much as a kid, but my parents did take me to England when I was quite young, maybe eight or so. At one point, we stayed at a country inn, and the owner took us for a walk. We were in this field together; it was very flat, and he said, “You see this? This used to be a jousting ground.” I don’t know if that was true or not, but in my young mind, I thought, “Wow, 700 years ago, there were knights jousting here! That’s so cool!” That was a revelation because in this country, although we have the legacy of the Native Americans and early settlers, we don’t have the kind of artifacts of deep history that Europe and other places have. So it struck me then how the past can suddenly come alive so quickly with just a little clue.

I think that is what I am often trying to do in my work: to animate some memory or presence that’s there. Or to spark or give people a hint or some kind of clue about what they’re looking at, how they can enter the picture. It’s certainly important to me that there’s a lot of deep space in many of my pictures. I like inviting people into the picture to explore there, linger and get lost in certain parts of them.

It’s in that mystery of which you speak where questions definitely emerge for the viewer. As one peers into each of your potent mini worlds, we know something complex and important is being conveyed. We may not be sure what, but we can feel it in our bodies. Like in your image of a chalkboard with so much scribble, it seems like we have just peered into the brain of a madman. How can one not wonder, “What is the story there?” That’s so powerful.

The story is that it’s the blackboard from a one-room schoolhouse out in the middle of nowhere in Western Nebraska. It was a schoolhouse that was working up until the late 1960s and it serviced the ranching families that lived around it. The kids went by horseback to the school; there was even a story about a kid who died because the weather changed so quickly after he left school and then froze to death in a blizzard.

The roof and the basic structure of the schoolhouse were kept up by the family whose land it was on, and the kids who went to that school have come back over the years. The blackboard holds decades of names of the people who had gone to the school by horseback, then returned and wrote their names there. Also, a bird was living in that one-room schoolhouse; you can see a bird’s nest in the upper corner of the picture. The bird would come into the nest and sometimes poop, so you have this kind of Jackson Pollock-esque poop action happening as well. It’s a collaboration between man and nature and time, with all those little white marks mixed in with the signatures and the scribbles. It also reminds me of a Cy Twombly, but then you have the plug under the chalkboard, which keeps it real, as in: it’s like a real thing. So you have the reality of this place shown through the electrical outlet and then this amazing world of the cosmos, of intention and total serendipity.

Is there a place that you visited that you wish still existed but is no longer?

I think that places exist at a certain time when particular threads come together at a certain moment in time. They embody a kind of ripeness, although that may not be the accurate word. I’ve never found the right word. But there are just certain intersections in time where all these threads coalesce. Havana in the late 90s was like that. Detroit in the late Aughts was also like that, a place of 600 abandoned factories, not to mention all the abandoned schools, churches and office buildings. I spent a lot of time in Prague in the early 80s, which was amazing. I try to find places before they’ve lost that quality I look for. Prague, Havana, and Detroit are places I’m glad I spent time in when I did; they have all changed so much since.

I’m looking for places that, at a certain moment in time, have a lot of threads of culture and history and politics. It’s very hard for me to explain. People have asked me, “What are you looking for?” And I’ve said, “I can show you the pictures, but I can’t explain it.” I feel like we’re missing words in English to describe what we’re talking about. Words like “shabby chic” and “decay” are just not enough. It’s more like objects and places that have history, that have been affected by time in some way that gives a kind of weight that new things don’t have. In a sense, I’m trying to get these places to reveal some of their secrets or tell some of their stories.

For the current exhibition at the Yancey Richardson Gallery, I’m showing seven huge landscapes that are all in dialogue with one another. I plan to make a book eventually from the Hudson Valley images, although first I’m going to take a little break. Then I’ll probably focus on shooting more interiors as well as making portraits and some details as well..

What places might you want to go to that you haven’t been to?

I’d like to spend more time in Mexico City. I’d also like to go to Japan, and I’ve never been to Australia, especially the northern territories, because I like crocodiles and that’s like the home of the huge saltwater crocodiles. (laughing.)

Did you grow up in an old house?

A 1920s house, nothing spectacularly old, but we had lots of old things that my mom collected from the mansion in Hartford. With my dad, we used to go to a lot of construction sites to see the unfinished buildings he had designed and were in the middle of construction. He would say things like, “Okay, this room here,” which just had a slab floor, “is going to be like a gymnasium.” I could imagine the way the architecture defined space and how those spaces could tell a story. Seeing those unfinished buildings as a kid, I got used to reading architecture. I think that experience made me quite good at looking at a building and assessing its hidden qualities. “Oh, is there going to be something interesting inside? Is it worth exploring? Worth knocking, ringing that doorbell to see who’s home and who lives there?”

There’s a lot in your work about the impact of humans. Do you want to speak about the future and our impact on our environment? You have children. Are you an optimist about the future or a pessimist?

It’s interesting because I know people who are optimistic, but they’re often either techno-optimistic (meaning they think that we’re going to make tools that are going to fix everything) or youth-optimistic as if they hope that the younger generation is going to fix things. Because I have younger children, I can’t be dire. Well, I could be, but I feel that would be very unfair to them to say, “Well, the world was much better before, but now everything’s going to shit.” And so yes, I am optimistic, in the sense that one doesn’t always have to love the world, but regardless, we do need to live in it.

And yet there’s an irony in your work as if you seem to be saying something about the unconsciousness of modern humans.

Yes, well, look at cars, for example. They all look the same now. There’s such blandness that one can barely find their car in a parking lot. We live in a gray world. Houses are painted gray, clothes are gray and cars are painted gray. So little color in the world. So I do think my pictures are optimistic, as if to say that despite the woes and tragedies of the world, we need beauty in our lives one way or another. We need beauty in our lives if we’re going to persist. And I think to dedicate one’s life to making beautiful things is not such a bad course of life. Not to be saccharin, not to be in denial of the complexity of life, but to reveal that things that are deeply beautiful are complex.

Did you have any big influences in terms of your work?

Yes, definitely. I went to Princeton as an undergraduate and was very lucky to have found a master photographer there named Emmet Gowin. He was an extraordinary teacher, a charismatic and inspiring soul from whom I learned everything as his apprentice for three years. There was also a delightful professor in the history of photography named Peter C. Bunnell. So I had excellent training in terms of the craft of photography and also in terms of the history of photography and image making. I had an amazing education. I never went to graduate school because I felt like I just needed to go off on my own at that point.

What was your first job? Did you just start shooting and getting hired, or were you assisting?

I assisted for a bit in New York City for some still life and food photographers. Then I went freelance after that. I made a living photographing artwork for artists. I worked often for the Paula Cooper Gallery and met artists like Robert Grover and Elizabeth Murray, as well as many other artists in the city. It was an interesting and not too stressful way to make a living, so that was how I supported myself while I was doing my own work.

How soon did you have your first show?

I had my first solo show in the city in 1986 when I was 29. But I have to say it took me about 20 years, from the time I left college, to make the kinds of pictures I was completely happy with. My early work was okay, but I think it wasn’t until my early 40s that I finally came into my own as a photographer. The work I did in Cuba was my first breakthrough project. When I tell my students that it might take them 20 years to find their way as an artist, they collectively groan! But sometimes, it does take that long to find one’s voice as a creative person.

“I tell my students, “It’s going to take you 20 years.” It takes a long time to find your voice as a creative person sometimes.”

Was it the place that inspired that? Or was it a shift in you as a person? Or both?

It was a shift in me as a person because I had worked previously as a solo practitioner. Then I got into filmmaking, and I made some short films. I even made a feature-length documentary. The way of working with other people in terms of filmmaking really informed how I started to approach photography. I began to work as a team. I had an assistant; sometimes, there was also somebody driving or working as a guide. Working in a kind of group situation changed my ability to make pictures.

In what way?

I had people to bounce ideas off, people to share energy with, and I had companionship and had fun. Photography can be a very lonely profession and a very isolated one at times, and I don’t like that about photography. Now, I enjoy the communal aspects of it, sharing ideas, collaborating, and bouncing ideas back and forth.

What is the next collaborative project that you’re dreaming up? Do you have one in mind?

I don’t know. I’ve been dreaming for years about doing a project on the West Coast and I probably will go back at some point. I would like to go back and photograph a city again; that’s my dream. I’m not sure where that’s going to be, but I’m ready. I’ve been photographing rural landscapes for years, and now I need my urban fix. I’d love to get back to tall buildings and narrow streets.

And what about Newburgh or Poughkeepsie?

We have shot in Poughkeepsie, Newburgh and Troy. The 60s were so harsh on towns like Newburgh. What a beautiful setting that city has, but it’s very heartbreaking for me to see all that was destroyed.

That’s the part that you haven’t talked about: the heartbreak. You’ve been speaking about it all with a sort of acceptance, as if everything just changes. But is there heartbreak for you when that level of natural beauty and exquisite old things and places are co-opted by plastic houses and the like?

“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot” -Joni Mitchell

Perhaps not so much in Troy, but definitely in Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, and Kingston. There’s that crazy, great film by Stephen Blauweiss and Lynn Woods called The Lost Rondout: A Story of Urban Renewal about the Rondout. It’s an hour-long documentary you can rent on Amazon about what was destroyed in Kingston alone…not just the post office, but about half of the Rondout, its beautiful housing and amazing buildings destroyed, and thousands of families displaced. And I think the same thing happened in Poughkeepsie and Newburgh. It’s hard for cities to recover from that because when that happens, it’s like they’ve lost part of their memory. The same thing happened in Detroit, where so many buildings were torn down there. Almost 30,000 historic buildings were removed between 2014-2018 alone. It’s such a loss to the identity of the city and that’s heartbreaking. I feel that they’ve been lobotomized in a sense, and often what replaces what’s been removed is of such mediocre quality. So that’s very sad and can be palpable up here in some of these towns.

That film you mention also explained that “thanks” to short-sightedness, in addition to the devastation to individuals and families in Kingston, some 90 businesses were also destroyed. Some residents called it urban removal rather than “renewal” since they “were dislocated, not relocated.” In light of all that, one might expect you to be more cynical, especially because what comes through your work seems to carry a strong statement about all that. It’s funny; you’re actually much lighter than expected. Is it because you can alchemize some of that through your work?

Yes, I am lighter than what many people expect–and people always expect me to be older! (Laughing.) I guess I generally like to be a lighter kind of person. I try to enjoy the moments of my life. Otherwise, everything would be so heavy for me that I couldn’t get out the door. I think my pictures really are the full expression of who I am. I try to funnel my thoughts and passions into the work because that’s the way I share all that with other people.

So you collaborated with David Byrne and others. Is there anyone that you especially loved collaborating with? You explained about collaboration as a priority…

Well, I’ve worked with some great writers: Philip Levine, the poet. Kent Haruf, the novelist, and then recently, Imani Perry, an African American, writer and educator. They were inspired by my photographs, wrote amazing text in my books and provided a kind of framework for the pictures in my books. But in terms of working together closely, I’ve had a whole series of assistants throughout the years, in Cuba, Russia, Detroit, and out west. They’re usually photographers, usually a little younger, and they bring a certain energy that pushes me to go beyond my limits. There’s been a whole series of six or seven different people who have been very crucial to my work. They learned from me, I learned from them, and that close collaboration was just a big part of my process. I really couldn’t call them my assistants. They’re my co-workers.

And when did you know you wanted to be a photographer?

I actually wanted to be a painter but I had a darkroom when I was 12 with my brother, so I’ve been a photographer for more than 50 years. I have always liked the color too.

Oh your color! Your palettes are just amazing.

Color is a big part of my emotional work…connecting and seducing people through color so that they have to think, “Oh, my gosh, I have to linger more.”

Was that always there, or was your work affected by the Cuba project and the lushness of its color landscape?

There were a lot of things I had to figure out in terms of working in a large format, in terms of my subjects, and in terms of the kind of formal language I was using. Once I figured that out–but again, that took 20 years–color has always been crucial to that. I was a photographer when I was young. Then, I did some painting. I was fortunate that color photography really came of age at the moment when I started to study photography in the mid-70s, just when it became affordable and practical for a young photographer.

Do you still shoot in large format?

I work mostly in high-resolution digital these days, which is almost equivalent to large-format film. It’s different, but it does have some benefits. I think analog photography is great if you’re a black-and-white photographer, but if you’re a color photographer, digital photography is in ways superior to film.

When making a photograph, is it mostly happenstance? Or how many of these images were born of something you first held in your mind and then went back to set it up and shoot in a particular way?

It’s usually experiential. Usually, I’m at a place and we’re exploring. Then finally, everything’s in place to make the picture and I try to capture it as best I can. When it comes back to the studio, I have to manage the files to some degree to get them to be exactly what I had in mind.

Are you teaching?

Yes, at The School of Visual Arts. I have taught in their graduate program for more than 20 years.

Do you have an agent?

I have a couple of galleries that represent me.

What is the biggest misconception of your work?

People often mistakenly call them paintings. I don’t mind, though some photographers feel like that’s an insult. I actually think they share the same language in so many ways and so that’s people’s reference. They haven’t seen many big color photographs that look as painterly so they don’t have any other terms for them.

Do you go anywhere without your camera?

Yes, all the time. I love to be in the world without my camera. I think it’s really important for a photographer to put the camera down and just experience the world.

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You can check out Andrew Moore’s “Whiskey Point” and “Other Tales” on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery at 525 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011, from November 16, 2023, through January 6, 2024.
Or delve even deeper into his work HERE.

Andrew Moore’s work is represented in numerous esteemed public collections in the United States and internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and others.