Charles Moore (photographer)

Charles Moore
Born	March 9, 1931
Died	March 11, 2010 (aged 79) Palm Beach Gardens, Florida
Nationality	American
Occupation	Photographer

One of Moore's May 3, 1963 photographs of the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama

Charles Lee Moore (March 9, 1931 – March 11, 2010) was an American photographer most famous for his photographs documenting the American civil rights era.

Life and career

Moore was born in 1931 in Hackleburg, Alabama. He served three years in the U.S. Marines as a photographer and then attended what was then known as the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. He next worked as a photographer with the morning and afternoon newspapers The Montgomery Advertiser and The Montgomery Journal.

In 1958, while working in Montgomery, Alabama for the Montgomery Advertiser, he photographed an argument between Martin Luther King, Jr. and two policemen.^[1] His photographs were distributed nationally by the Associated Press, and published in Life.

From this start, Moore traveled throughout the South documenting the Civil Rights Movement. His most famous photograph, Birmingham, depicts demonstrators being attacked by firemen wielding high-pressure hoses. U.S. Senator Jacob Javits, said that Moore's pictures "helped to spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."^[1]

In 1962, Moore left the newspapers to start a freelance career. He worked for the Black Star picture agency, which sold much of his work to Life.

Moore went on to cover the Vietnam War and conflicts in Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Haiti. He then moved on to nature, fashion and travel photography, in addition to corporate work.

In 1989, Moore became the first recipient of the Eastman Kodak Crystal Eagle Award for Impact in Photojournalism which is awarded for a "body of photographic work which has influenced public perceptions on important issues of our time" in the NPPA–University of Missouri Pictures of the Year International Competition.^[2]

In 2008, Moore's last photography observed the removal of a tree at Barton Hall (Alabama), a historic 1840's plantation home.

Moore died at age 79, on March 11, 2010, in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.^[3][4]

Publications

• Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-8173-1152-0.
• The Motherlode. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2006.
• I Fight With My Camera (2005) video, 26 minutes.^{[n 1]}

See also

• Photographers of the African-American Civil Rights Movement
• Race Riot (a painting by Andy Warhol)

Notes

1. The film is available to view on YouTube here.

References

1. "About Charles Moore". Kodak. Retrieved 2006-12-26.
2. Chapnick, Harold (1994). Truth Needs No Ally. Columbia, Missouri, USA: University of Missouri Press. pp. 154–155. ISBN 0-8262-0955-6.
3. Photographer Charles Moore dies at 79, Associated Press, March 15, 2010.
4. Martin, Douglas (15 March 2010). "Charles Moore, Rights-Era Photographer, Dies at 79". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 November 2015.

External links

• Life magazine 17 May 1963, p. 26, at Google Books - Moore's Birmingham photographs
• Collection of Moore photographs on Kodak.com
• Charles Moore - post-mortem audio story and slideshow by NPR
• Charles Moore's final photography 2008