FRIDAY, April 30th 7:00 PM: Photographer ANDREW MOORE

We are pleased to present photographer Andrew Moore appearing at the Oakland Community College Theater at the Royal Oak Campus on  Friday, April 30th at 7:00 PM to autograph and talk about his latest large format photography book Detroit Disassembled. This controversial new book is one of the first to focus extensively on the ruins of Detroit. It raises important questions concerning all of us who live in the Detroit area. This event is co-sponsored by Oakland Community College and the Book Beat. Oakland Community College is located at 739, South Washington in Royal Oak. For more information please contact: Book Beat at 248-968-1190. Books are  now available for purchase at  Book Beat or at the event.

Andrew Moore is a professional photographer, educator, cinematographer and producer. His previous book, Russia: Beyond Utopia, was published by Chronicle Books. Moore was also executive producer and cinematographer for the Award Winning documentary on artist Ray Johnson, How to Draw a Bunny. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Moore ventures well beyond the typical shoot-and-run exploiter, yet I cannot shake the disturbing feeling I get when I view these photographs. I think I understand Moore’s intent, and I even accept that he may have achieved his artistic purpose. Yet I find his photographs unremittingly bleak. – Read More: John Gallagher, The Detroit Freepress

The primary signs of life in Moore’s photographs come not from humans, but from nature: mossy grass grows in buildings, trees crawl from warehouses, and houses are swallowed whole by reaching vines. Moore’s postscript—and more quietly but importantly, his photographs—invoke Detroit’s motto, Speramus Meliora, Resurget Cineribus: “We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes.” –Read More: The New Yorker

Is Detroit America’s Rome?… Moore’s vision is more lyrical, almost optimistic. The sight of fluorescent moss carpeting a floor or birch trees sprouting from a bed of rotting books signifies for him not — or not only — a boomtown’s tragic collapse but an occasion to devise a new urban paradigm, one that incorporates vast swaths of woods and farmland. Moore’s Detroit, though sparsely populated, is not a ghost town.    -from a recent review in: the New York Times: Ruin With a View

Beyond their jawdropping content, Moore’s photographs inevitably raise the uneasy question of the long-term future of a country in which such extreme degradation can exist unchecked. -Publisher’s website blurb for Detroit Disassembled

“Andrew Moore’s images, by contrast, transcend politics….his photographs comprise an other­worldly calculus of a profoundly troubled nation eternally uncertain of its place in the world.“ – Boris Fishman on Russia: Beyond Utopia

Andrew Moore is best known for his complex and painterly images of Cuba, Russia, and New York City. He has had nine solo shows in New York as well as numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally. His photographs are represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Library of Congress, the Israel Museum, the High Museum, the Eastman House and the Canadian Centre for Architecture amongst others. Moore has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The New York State Council on the Arts, and several private foundations.  His photographs have been published by Wired, The New York Times Magazine, Departures, Conde Nast Traveler, Art and Auction, Geo, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Harpers, Esquire, Fortune, New York Magazine, and The New Yorker.