• Andrew Moore Theater presents a thematic thread that has carried the artist throughout his career. Photographing these grand yet fragile...

    Andrew Moore Theater presents a thematic thread that has carried the artist throughout his career. Photographing these grand yet fragile interiors, Moore captures theaters in various stages of restoration, use, and decline, honoring them as cultural vessels that once gathered entire communities. His images evoke a cinematic stillness: velvets faded, plaster crumbling, and light drifting across rows of empty seats as though awaiting an unseen audience. In these environments, Moore shows how theaters function not only as monuments to artistic expression but also as witnesses to the passage of time, bearing the traces of generations who performed, watched, and dreamed within their walls.

     

    Standing before these images, we are given room to project our own memories and stories. The theaters become reminders that we, too, are actors navigating shifting sets, evolving scenes, and our own inevitable final act. “Rather than being told what to feel, what to do, or what to look at,” Moore explains, “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.” Through this work, Moore highlights our enduring need for beauty, ritual, and shared experience — elements essential not only to the survival of these theaters, but to our own humanity.

  • About Andrew Moore

    American photographer Andrew Moore (born 1957) is widely acclaimed for his photographic series, usually taken over many years, which record the effect of time on the natural and built landscape. These series include work made in Cuba, Russia, Bosnia, Times Square, Detroit, the High Plains, the American South and most recently, the Hudson Valley.

     

    Moore’s photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Library of Congress amongst many other institutions. He has received a fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as well been award grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the J M Kaplan Fund.

     

    His most recent book, Blue Alabama, with a preface by Imani Perry and story by Madison Smartt Bell was released in the fall of 2019. His previous work on the lands and people along the 100th Meridian in the US, called Dirt Meridian, with a preface by Kent Haruf, was exhibited at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. An earlier book, the bestselling Detroit Disassembled, included an essay by the late Poet Laureate Philip Levine. An exhibition of the same title opened at the Akron Museum of Art before also traveling to the Queens Museum of Art, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Moore’s other books include: Inside Havana (2002), Governors Island (2004), Russia, Beyond Utopia (2005) and Cuba (2012).

     

    Additionally, his photographs have appeared in Art in America, Artnews, The Bitter Southerner, Harpers, National Geographic, New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, TIME, Vogue, Wired and World of Interiors.

     

    Moore produced and photographed How to Draw a Bunny, a documentary feature film on Ray Johnson, who when he died in 1996 was called “New York’s most famous unknown artist”. The movie premiered at the 2002 Sundance Festival, where it won a Special Jury prize.

     

    Moore was a lecturer on photography in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University from 2001 to 2010, and presently teaches a graduate seminar in the MFA Photography Video and Related Media program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Moore lives and works in Kingston, NY.

  • Theater
  • Andrew Moore, Palace Theater, Gary Indiana, 2008

    Andrew Moore

    Palace Theater, Gary Indiana, 2008

    "In the early days of cinema, when movies were silent and in black and white, the theaters themselves were grand spectacles of color, ornamentation and musical accompaniment. This theater, which opened in 1925, was the grandest venue in this steel town for many years:  at one point the Jackson Five (from Gary) performed there, before it eventually closed in 1989.

     

    When I was there in 2008, scrappers had stolen ever bit of salvageable metal, including the armature for the seats. (The leftover orange seat cushions are visible at the bottom). The building was completely boarded up, and my assistant and I used a crowbar to pry off a sheet of plywood to gain access. As the interior was totally dark, we used a mirror, which reflected a tiny ray of sunlight, to illuminate the space while I made a long time exposure.


    At one point I received an email from the son of the former manager of the theater. He told me how he used to play in the theater when he was a kid and asked if I might send him a small print since he was so nostalgic about the place.  As part of our correspondence, I asked him about the scene on the fire curtain (which miraculously had been untouched by the scrappers when I was there). He told me that the theater’s owner, on a vacation trip to Spain, had made photographs of small towns (certainly b/w at that time), and that the owner had given some of these pictures to the painter who made the backdrop.  I did end up sending the son a small print of his beloved theater, and he in turn sent me a large box, from the company he worked for, filled with snack bags of potato sticks."

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    • Andrew Moore, Stairway to the Balcony, Opera House, Greensboro, AL, 2016
      Andrew Moore, Stairway to the Balcony, Opera House, Greensboro, AL, 2016
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    • Andrew Moore, Soul Bar, Augusta, GA, 2014
      Andrew Moore, Soul Bar, Augusta, GA, 2014
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    • Andrew Moore, Red Chairs Selwyn Theater, Times Square, New York, 1996
      Andrew Moore, Red Chairs Selwyn Theater, Times Square, New York, 1996
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  • Andrew Moore, Grand Luncheonette, New York, 1996

    Andrew Moore

    Grand Luncheonette, New York, 1996

    "This is a small lunch counter that was tucked in below the entrance to the Selwyn Theater. When I made this picture in the winter of 1995-96, this was probably the last working business on what had been one of the busiest blocks in NYC.  In the movie Taxi Driver, the Selwyn is where Travis Bickle takes Betsy on their first and only date and one can get a brief glimpse of this entry way in the film. 

     

    Before I made this picture, I went inside the luncheonette and ordered a hamburger. I think the guy behind the counter appreciated that gesture since he later consented to being in the photograph. Within a year after I made the image the business was closed for good.

     

    I only later learned that he esteemed photo realist painter, Richard Estes, made a painting of the same spot, also called Grand Luncheonette, in 1969, which even back then depicted this small, family-owned spot as one of the last of its kind."

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    • Andrew Moore, Restoration Studio, Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2002
      Andrew Moore, Restoration Studio, Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2002
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    • Andrew Moore, La Guarida II, Havana, Cuba, 1998
      Andrew Moore, La Guarida II, Havana, Cuba, 1998
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  • Andrew Moore, Theater Boxes, Times Square Theater, New York, 1996

    Andrew Moore

    Theater Boxes, Times Square Theater, New York, 1996

    "The photograph depicts the interior of the Times Square Theater, which is located on 42nd street between 7th and 8th Avenues, and was opened by the Selwyn brothers in 1920. Built to offer dramatic and musical productions, the theater switched over in the early 1930s to showing movies exclusively. Near its shuttering in the mid-1980s, the theater was said to be showing obscure action and horror films on a triple bill.

     

    When I gained access to the building in 1996 after it had long been closed, the entire interior had at some point been painted this deep blue, which gave it this strangely ethereal and underwater ambience. I also found the closed off balconies, with their high profile and overhanging canopies, to feel like ghostly sentinels watching over this once proud establishment. Although all the other theaters on this block were renovated during The New 42nd Street Redevelopment, this interior remains unused and in limbo because of its configuration and limited access."

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