Dr David Moore

David is the Principal Lecturer for photography. He is a widely published and exhibited practitioner using expanded documentary modes to observe state and social apparatus through photography, performance and moving image.

His practice considers agency of the subject within historical and contemporary contexts, and the effect of corporate or political hegemony as expressed or visible in a variety of contexts.

Recent practice returned to the site of David's1988 series `Pictures from the Real World, Colour Photographs 1987-88’ (Dewi Lewis Publishing /HerePress 2013]. ‘Lisa and John’ (2017) re-activates, and performs a critical reassessment of the purpose and location of his own documentary practices using participation with the former subject, installation and documentary theatre. 

David worked collaboratively with Lisa and John, both subjects of, 'Pictures from the Real World', asking them to select their own photographs from the full archive via a mutually agreed methodology. This intervention challenged the authority of the original via active participation in the production of a new body of work where the former subjects stepped into the production space.

Through this ‘Lisa and John’ explored new possibilities of a more dialectical engagement, whilst drawing on histories of installation art, participatory practice, theatre and photography to create new work.

Perhaps the most significant departure from photography itself is the stage play. ‘The Lisa and John Slideshow’, using devised and verbatim methodologies. Playing on an observer/spectator/subject axis, the various outcomes create a dialogue posing questions around the production of knowledge through documentary photography. 

Previously, using photography as a democratic tool to observe live post-panoptic sites, David produced three significant bodies of work via long term documentary engagement and collaboration with the Imperial War Museum and others to gain access to environments two of which had never been previously photographed. Within the  series, ‘28Days’ [2009], ’The Last Things’, [Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2007] and ‘The Commons’ [Velvet Press, 2003] David produced photographs that observe and interpret government and security environments. 

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David's work is held in public and private collections and he has been the recipient of several major funding awards from Arts Council England and The British Council and  he is a member of CREAM at the University of Westminster

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.