Henry Moore

Henry Moore is pictured in a field near his home in Perry Green pushing a bicycle. The bright green grass fills the frame, with a row of trees right at the top of the image, the composition cutting off the tops of some of them. Moore is seen from a distance, framed by the path formed cutting through the field sectioning the composition into three and placing Moore at the centre. The sculptor appears to have been caught during his leisure time, in casual clothes and his hat perched at an angle on the top of his head.

Moore and Hedgecoe remained friends from their first meeting in 1956 until Moore’s death in 1986 and during this time, Hedgecoe took around 6,000 photographs of Moore. [1] In some of his photography manuals Hedgecoe used his images of the sculptor as an example of how to take a prolonged portrait of a single subject. [2] As Hedgecoe explained, with photography ‘you capture forever a frozen instant of time. But how much more meaningful those images can be is made plain when you see a progression of pictures of the same person taken over a long period of time.’ [3]

His photographs of Moore formed the basis of four books, which incorporated Hedgecoe’s photographs alongside Moore’s words. Although he produced around 30 photography manuals, these were Hedgecoe’s only books on a single subject.

Tania Moore, December 2020

[1] As estimated by Charlotte Bullions and Emily Unthank at the Henry Moore Foundation, 2020.

[2] John Hedgecoe, Photographing People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), p.56.

[3] Ibid.