David is the Principal Lecturer for Documentary Photography and Photojournalism and a widely published and exhibited practitioner who uses expanded documentary modes to observe state and social apparatus using 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.
My current practice returns to the site of my 1988 series `Pictures from the Real World, Colour Photographs 1987-88’ (Dewi Lewis Publishing /HerePress 2013]and addresses agency and a critique of documentary photography as a genre using collaboration, installation and documentary theatre.
‘Lisa and John’ (2017) re-activates the archive of David Moore’s of the series, and performs a critical reassessment of it’s purpose and location.
I worked collaboratively with Lisa and John, two subjects of the series, 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 ‘intervention’, and collaboration ‘Lisa and John’ explore and critiques new possibilities of documentary observation, 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 and performed in London, Belfast and Derby
Playing on an observer/spectator/subject axis, the various outcomes create a dialogue posing questions around the production of knowledge through documentary photography.
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Previously, using photography as a democratic tool to observe live post-panoptic sites, I 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 my series, ‘28Days’ [2009], ’The Last Things’, [Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2007] and ‘The Commons’ [Velvet Press, 2003] I produced series of photographs that observe and interpret government and security environments.
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My 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.
I am a member of CREAM at the University of Westminster