David Moore, Capturing the creation of the Sydney Opera House
Photographer: David Moore
Exhibition: Capturing the creation of the Sydney Opera House
Venue: Customs House
31 Alfred Street, Circular Quay, Sydney NSW 2000
Level 2 Library, 1 November 2013 to 26 January 2014
Since opening in 1973, the Opera House has entertained audience in excess of 65 million. This year the Sydney Opera House will celebrate four decades as an eminent national building valuable piece of cultural and tourism infrastructure.
David Moore (1927–2003) was Australia’s most renowned and widely travelled photojournalist. His extraordinary archive covers both his homeland and the many countries and assignments he covered over a sixty-year career.
From 1962 to 1973 Moore photographed the construction of the Opera House. The selection from that body of work exhibited here at Customs House is eloquent in its commemoration of a unique building while at the same time reinforcing a noteworthy photographic legacy.
Jørn Utzon’s reaction to Moore’s epic depiction of the construction of the Opera House was to classify the photographs as ‘marvelous (sic)…by far the best I have ever seen’. Writing in early 1968, he added: ‘the Sydney Opera House needs to be seen with a great artist’s eye such as yours to make people understand [the building’s] poetic qualities’. It was a generous tribute to a fellow spirit, a photographer who was in communion with, and acutely sensitive to, Utzon’s mould-breaking vision.
The Customs House exhibition is Moore’s posthumous returning of the compliment, a homage to the daring and genius of Utzon’s expressionist architecture: an approach which insists on the new, original and visionary; the concept of architecture as a work of art. Moore himself called the Opera House ‘a fabulous freestanding sculpture’. His meticulous application to documenting the construction process from the bones upward was passionate and committed: a kind of love affair in which his images reflect an awe and respect for Utzon’s work. Alternatively alive with the play of light or suffused with a brooding romanticism, they sing of purity, precision and technical control.