Henry Moore at Forte dei Marmi

Sculptor Henry Moore is pictured through a deckchair, his head turned to capture his profile in silhouette. Moore and the photographer John Hedgecoe were on a beach in Forte dei Marmi, where they holidayed together with their families each year from 1967 to 1972. Moore spent around six weeks each summer there so he could combine family holidays with carving in the Carrara quarries.

The camera is at sand level, part of the lens even below the soft sand, so the deckchair and its inhabitant looms up against the clear sky. The deckchair frames Moore’s silhouette, which is rendered in bright orange, portraying the vibrant image appropriate to its holiday context. The photograph is unusually colourful, both for photographs of Moore and those by Hedgecoe. Hedgecoe wrote of this image, ‘Note the slightly lighter areas of the silhouette, particularly the face, where the body is not in contact with the chair. The structure of the chair is an intriguing shape and provides an interesting frame for this unusual portrait.’ [1]

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. [2] 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. [3] 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.’ [4]

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] John Hedgecoe, The Book of Photography: How to See and Take Better Pictures (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), p.54.

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