Andrew Moore on Trusting the Process and Photographing Time

Tucked in the quiet, upstate sprawl of Kingston, New York, Andrew Moore’s world is framed by memory, color, and the slow layering of history. “I’ve always been interested in telling stories through imagery,” he begins, his voice calm but loaded with decades of commitment to seeing the world differently. Moore is not just a fine art photographer, he is a builder of visual memory, one frame at a time.

This is Andrew Moore.

Where the Darkroom Met the Dream

Moore’s story begins, quite fittingly, in a dim attic. “My dad was a pretty serious amateur photographer,” Moore recalls, referring to the darkroom he helped build with his father and brother. His earliest photos were stark images of telephone poles and distant rocks, odd enough to concern his father. “If you’re going to make these strange pictures,” he said, “we better build a darkroom.” And so they did, both to nurture Moore’s emerging talent and to avoid the inflated costs of the local photo store.

But photography wasn’t Moore’s first love. “I was very inspired by paintings,” he says, tracing the origin of his color obsession to museum visits with his mother. Color, for Moore, is not a supplement, it’s the lifeblood. “Emotion in a photograph begins with color,” he explains. “I’m very aware of the emotional responses to the relationships between colors… I use this very deliberately.”

From Times Square to Empty Plains

Moore’s trajectory was not meteoric, it was a long, steady exposure. After graduating from Princeton, where he studied under the deeply influential Emmet Gowin, Moore found himself assisting commercial photographers in New York, before migrating to New Orleans. There, in the haunted quarters of ice houses and coffin factories, he crafted his first real body of work. “It was like going to graduate school,” he says, “except I never did.”

The 1990s saw a turning point. After his series on Times Square’s fading theaters, he ventured into Havana. “That was truly a big turning point… the first pictures that were significantly mine,” he reflects. From there, the dominoes fell, Cuba led to Russia, then Bosnia, Detroit, the High Plains, and most recently, the Hudson Valley. “One thing always led to another,” Moore says. “The work unfolded, and I followed.”

Among his most ambitious endeavors was the decade-long project Dirt Meridian, a photographic meditation on the emptiness of the American West. “How do you portray emptiness?” he asks. “It was a challenge I worked ten years to solve.” The photographs feel like quiet epics, vast, desolate, and impossibly precise.

Building Photographs Like Rooms

Moore describes his photographs as rooms, structured, built, and filled with openings for the viewer. “There are windows, doors, walls, lines of perspective… you’re actually inside a space,” he explains. That architectural thinking, inherited from his father’s profession, grounds his compositions in form. But it’s the narrative that elevates them. “A great photograph is like a piece of music,” Moore says. “It has structure, but also an emotional arc.”

Perhaps no image embodies this philosophy better than the photograph of Henry Ford’s office, a space abandoned and overtaken by time. “The floor had turned into moss,” he remembers. “It looked like a rice paddy in Indonesia.” The image, now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a gift of photographic fortune, offered by a receptionist with keys after Moore was twice denied access. “Pure serendipity,” he laughs. “The photo gods blessed me that day.”

The Pictures You’ll Never See

Despite a deep catalog of monumental works, some of Moore’s favorite photographs remain unseen. “My wife had a home birth,” he shares. “There are these extraordinary images of our daughters… but they’re too personal. My wife is naked in the background. They’ll probably never be published.” It’s a rare glimpse into the private realm of an artist whose work often deals with public memory and historical residue.

Moore sees themes emerge only after months, sometimes years, of exploration. “I don’t start with a concept,” he explains. “I start with a feeling… and then I begin peeling the layers back.” In this way, Moore is less director and more archaeologist, uncovering meaning from the sediment of time and place.

Patience, Practice, and the Long Arc

For Andrew Moore, success didn’t arrive quickly. “It took me twenty years to really find my voice,” he admits. And even now, as he works on a new project in the Hudson Valley that pivots toward the supernatural, he stays grounded in collaboration. “Photography can be lonely,” he says. “What keeps me fresh is working with others, especially young people. They keep me engaged.”

His advice to aspiring photographers? Make a habit of art. “Do something every day—take a photo, read a book, talk to someone new. Stay in the flow.” For Moore, photography isn’t just about capturing a moment, it’s about giving that moment a structure to breathe in, to live in, and perhaps, to echo.

In a world overrun with images, Moore’s work reminds us that some photographs are not just seen but inhabited. They whisper stories, wait for discovery, and, like old buildings, reveal more with time. “The best photographs,” Moore says, “invite you in. Then they ask you to stay.”

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