Moore's video work has been featured on PBS and MTV; his feature-length documentary about the artist Ray Johnson, How to Draw a Bunny, won the Special Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.
Moore's parents supported his early interest in photography; his father built him an attic darkroom and his mother introduced him to the works of Peter Beard, whose book, Eyelids of the Morning, a study of Nile crocodiles on Lake Rudolf, was being published by NYGS.
[1][2][3][4] In 1975, Moore enrolled at Princeton University, where he worked on an independent major in photography under the guidance and mentorship of the historian Peter Bunnell and the photographer Emmet Gowin, who at the time, was completing his first monograph.
[7][8] In 1981, Moore returned to New York City, where he began a three-year project documenting the rapid changes to the urban landscape, specifically at the South Street Seaport and Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan.
In Buffalo, Moore met a group of artists working with appropriated imagery, which inspired him to begin using mechanical and chemical processes to incorporate multiple negatives, paintings, drawings, and xeroxes into complex montage images outside of strict documentary practice.
With all of the theaters between 7th and 8th avenues scheduled to be razed or refurbished, Moore sought permission to photograph the torn seats and faded fire curtains which told the stories of those spaces.
[19] Despite his change of style, the work was well received; in a review for The New Yorker, Andrew Long noted, "The straight forward treatment is a departure for the photographer, who characteristically produces multi-image evocations of New York City.
"[26] Moore remarked, "For me these kinds of subjects present a cross section through time: they address Russia's complex past, as well as the larger compacting and collapsing processes of contemporary history.
Moore worked with the director and editor John Walter to delve into the mysterious life and death of Johnson, an artist whose "world was made up of amazing coincidences, serendipities and karmic gags," according to Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times.
The filmmakers "couldn't have chosen a more elusive subject for a movie; their success in evoking Johnson, and in documenting his world, is a triumph of sympathy over psychology, memory over historicism," wrote Stuart Klawans for The Nation.
The film also won the Grand Prix du Public 2002 at the Rencontres Internationales de Cinema in Paris and was nominated for a 2003 Independent Spirit Award and listed in New York Magazine's "Top Ten of 2004.
While Moore's Detroit series follows the themes of transformation and decaying space explored in previous bodies of work, his focus on the motor city generated controversy in the pages of The New Republic and the journal Guernica.
"[9] Curator Sarah Kennel writes in The Memory of Time, an exhibition catalog from the National Gallery of Art, that, "in Moore's photographs, ruination serves more explicitly as an allegory of modernity's failure.
Joseph Stanhope Cialdella argues in the journal Environmental History that Moore's work instead conveys the "aesthetic of a postindustrial sublime" which "gives nature the authority to transform the image of Detroit into a novel, yet disturbing landscape that blurs the lines between wilderness and the city.
[5] From 2005 to 2014, Moore photographed the people and landscape of "great American Desert," which roughly includes the area west of the 100th meridian to the Rocky Mountains, from Texas north to Canada.