Henry Moore

Sculptor Henry Moore wears his workers clothes with an apron over a woollen jumper. Moore liked to be photographed at work or in working clothes to give the impression of how he made his sculpture by hand. Although many of the photographs between Moore and Hedgecoe may seem natural, Moore controlled his image through photography and film more than any artist before him.

Although Hedgecoe dated this photograph as 1952, Julia Hedgecoe, who had introduced the sculptor and photographer, said their first meeting did not take place until 1956. [1] Julia Mardon (later Hedgecoe) and John Hedgecoe as aspiring photographers visited the well-known sculptor. Already well-established in his career, Moore frequently had visitors seeking him out, and often made time for young art students. Hedgecoe was invited back again the day after their first visit to take photographs of Moore’s works, which Moore decided to include in an exhibition of his work. The two soon became firm friends spending every weekend together and going on holiday together each year.

In total, 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.

A second version of this image is in the Sainsbury Centre Collection, although not as close a crop, which is object number 50271.

Tania Moore, January 2021

Read More