"At 15, I was looking to be a singer- songwriter... During the USA Texas International Peace (Pop) Festival (in 1969's Summer of Love), I ran into my old neighbor, Dallas Cowboy Quarterback, 'Dandy' Don Meredith. Someone in his company had a very professional looking camera - I had a very unprofessional one... The time was three weeks past Woodstock. The next week, I asked my mother, Gwendolyn, and Stepfather, Roy, for help obtaining a camera of professional quality. Before, I had begged for a 1969 Chevy Super Sport 396 (or any Hot-Rod). They considered this a more reasonable request - and a bit later, they helped me purchase a 35mm Canon FT. Like retrofitting a motor on an old style bucket with a wooden handle - I started to churn immediately. Less than two years later, I began my professional photography career - in Dallas, Spring 1971, at the age of 17...
     I spent four years working with Architectural Photographer, Douglas E. Tomlinson, nine years my senior (now deceased). A fine credit to Doug would be his, 'Same Titled' Book & Exhibition, "Dallas: From the Ground Up." It illustrated the old architecture Dallas still had in 1975, and Doug's images preserved precious parts of that history - soon to fall to developers of a booming metropolitan city. The book (with text by Dallas writer, David Dillon) was published to coincide with a premier of his exhibition at, 'The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts,' - now known as the Dallas Museum of Art..."

    "As Tomlinson and I began working professionally, I had to legally have my minorities removed, so I could enter into contracts in my home state of Texas. The Internal Revenue Service audited us after only six months in business... Our CPA gave us night lessons over the next two weeks on how to more properly ledger our books. So I learned good bookkeeping habits, and, interestingly, we were already seeing other fledging photo businesses (that started up after us) close shop. Doug and I agreed - we would keep our doors open for three years, before we decided where to go from there... Meanwhile, I still had to wait until I was 21 to drink, legally, but I did register to vote - just as soon as I was 18. And 18 months later, the American Viet Nam War Draft was scuttled by President Nixon - within 48 hours before my draft number (M-69) was up to be called - I was Nineteen and a half. So, I was blessed to continue my career in photography..."

    "My Step-Father, Roy, would supply Doug and I with some early photo jobs - since he worked in the Ad Agency business. We also picked up a bunch of aviation work photographing customized Grumman Corporate Jets. Even more important, we got our foot in the door of a fledgling health organization... It was led by an nearly unknown man, an M.D. and former Air Force Colonel from Oklahoma, who's name was Dr. Kenneth Cooper. Cooper started a revolution in heath - becoming the, 'Father of Aerobics,' and our 'working' relationship lasted 35 years₍₁₎. Tomlinson and I kept the business afloat as we had promised each other, growing and adding three employees - including a blond rep with a famous name, Carol Baker - who did a fine job of catching us some big fish. Still, I most remember my secretary, Mary Blakemore, who so loved Elvis, that when she got a ticket to see him in a performance in town, I literally had to help her dress - she was so nervous and excited... Mary was of that generation just before Beatle Mania.  Finally, in 1974, at Christmas, Doug and I decided to close shop and go our separate ways. I didn't truly enjoy trying to fulfill other people's expectations of what the photographic medium could produce - remember, this was way before digital darkrooms. I have to wonder, these days - how many images in advertising are honest straight photo-captures? I doubt it is great percent. The point being, I had found my eye with the camera, and it pointed away from commercial endeavors. At the time, I had been photographing women's haircuts my brother, Tully Weiss, was creating after he came back to Texas - having worked some famous floors in NYC with great stylists of the day, like Paul Mitchell and Vidal Sassoon. The hair cuts were beautiful, and I began seeing them as landscapes. I distinguished the difference between the art of haircutting and the art of capturing the flow and energy of a great haircut. Funny as it sounds - that led me towards the great landscape as my next photo fodder. I was discovering how to fulfill my own expectations through the wonders the world had hiding in wait... I worked my way up to traveling continents for fare, and then I discovered I could actually find the nature of my needs all around my own near-home environment."

"Hay Stacks - Norway" © 1982 Brad Michael Moore"                                                 

    "So from the mid-seventies, I shifted my photo concentration to landscapes, and wildlife image captures, for the next ten years (and onward to present). It was during this early era, I first began manipulating my imagery, and started my 'MultiPlex Series." After 1984, I began to explore more deeply - the 'fine art nature,' of the image captures I made - becoming mindfully more painterly in the manipulations I created and photographed. I worked more in the home studio - or set up work stations in the mountains near Lake City, Colorado, so I could access natural materials more readily."

    "I was curating exhibitions in the Dallas-Fort Worth MetroPlex when I broke my back, in a cycling accident, in the fall of 1989. I had known pain before - but not like this pain. It became my permanent neighbor - I was 37. So, I would spend the next 3 months in a full-body brace, recalcifying my First Lumbar vertebrae - mostly on my sofa. I could get around on my hands and knees. I had real friends - the kind who would wash me, and dress me - even brush my teeth (I couldn't do the sideways motion), and this was just before the electric toothbrush... I had no health insurance - one of nearly 10 million Americans then, and one of 50-plus million Americans today - who are uninsured, or uninsurable... I had to sell the best pieces of my small fine art glass, and photography collection, to pay off my medical and hospital bills. The image I sold, and miss the most - was my Arnold Newman portrait of Pablo Picasso, circa 1954 (hand on head). I had purchased it for $400.00, in 1984, personally from Arnold Newman. Newman was on a lecture visit to Dallas - at a gallery where I served on the board. Arnold Newman would eventually pass away on June 5th, 2007, and the image I sold - is now valued at $40,000.00 or better (according to ArtNet)... For me, the Picasso portrait was priceless... However, having had the art on my walls for five years, it became a gift that keeps on giving... Although it is no longer in my phyiscal possession, I still carry the lessons it taught me - and that is to question everything."

    "Orchard," Rare, Unique C-Type 11 x14 Image , Summa Valley, CA. © 1978 BMM      

    "While recuperating from my accident, for the next quarter of a year, I began to acquire a mounting credit card collection. It quickly accumulated (unsolicited) after I paid off my medical/hospital bills from the blood money of my art collection - gone to art purveyors. I decided I could go to college the next spring, and charge my education. My grandmother, Mimi, would chip in along the way."

    "In the end, I got all the education I could on my own - a lot of it I could even use. In the beginning, I would walk 3 miles in the predawn hours of each school day - to catch a shuttle bus on the old Central Expressway - just north of downtown Dallas. It was a 57-mile long trip between that part of Dallas and campus in Denton, Texas. It was a tough first year. By my forth semester, my mother gave me her old, well-used Fleetwood, and I began driving the commute myself. Since I already knew photography, intimately - for my studies, I concentrated on sculpture as a major focus, and I minored in English. Sculpture was a brave choice for a man recovering from a broken back... I often built larger than human-sized works. Eventually though, I fell one semester's worth of credits short of my Bachelor of Arts, from The School of Art, at The University of North Texas, in Denton... My maxed-out credit cards, my life in waiting, and Mimi, could carry me no further... My oldest brother, Guy, had already checked out our dead-beat dad for help with his education, to no avail - so, here was 'my end' of the "Paper Chase..."

       "It seems I have no real hobbies that are not, in some fashion, related to my art processes. My interests are, to be better motivated in creating the art of my imagination - both from day and night dreams, and also, from the art ponds of creation - carried by human spirit, and Mother Nature."

    "My education it seems, was of limited value to my path in my art - I had already begun exploring AutoCad (Computer Aided Design) before I went to college, and my 3-D explorations dwindled after I determined I could not afford the visions of my esthetics. Still, the English Minor I endeavored for was indeed, an effort I found worthy, and useful. Debate and critical review were other notions I polished up on. An European artist, working in Denver, Colorado, Sasha Louie, quotes from Albert Einstein on her web pages... Aberto having once said, "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world..." Great thought - Einstein!

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'(1) Doug Tomlinson, and I, continued to come together together ever fall, as a ritual of friendship, for 35 years, to shoot Dr. Copper's Annual 'Tyler Cup Run' - created to raise health awareness within American companies. I would most often work the event also with Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic gold medalist, and 1976 Olympic silver medalist in the marathon. Shorter was also the first chairman of the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Doug, who had been fighting Cancer for four and a half years, passed away in June of 2006. With his memory in mind - I retired our association with what had grown to become the, "Cooper Institute," that upcoming fall."

 "Ruins - Sweden - Monochrome" © 1982 Brad Michael Moore          

Born July 2nd, 1952, Dallas, Texas USA - In the Beginning

    "When I was four and a half, my family was returning home one night during a raging rain storm. Right as we were entering our front driveway - a huge bolt of lightening struck our Red Oak tree, and split it in two - right down to the ground. It was an awesome experience for a little kid. My parents replaced the Red Oak with an Ash tree that fall. I first began photographing the next year (with my grandmother's camera). That next spring - the new Ash tree was blooming, and it caught my eye, as I was playing on the front porch walkway.  I looked up into the tree's buds sprouting, and saw high wispy Cirrus clouds through the tree's branches... This became my first meaningful photograph - captured in black and white in 1957."

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"Blooming Ash - Dormant Pecan, Fairfax Avenue" © 1957 Brad Michael Weiss / 2008 Brad Michael Moore

    "As a young adult, and professional photographer, I became a, ‘Color Specialist.’ Turned out my business partner, Doug,  was 'Color Blind.' Doug helped me to develop my color senses, and technical expertise, in the same fashion as he had developed his own sense of the Black & White photography medium - where he had become a master of Ansel Adam's Zone System. For me, there were a few more trials and errors, for the field of color artists, techniques, and the history of the color medium, were all very shallow in 1972."

    "It was meaningful for me that, 12 years earlier, President John F. Kennedy's Administration was the first, in American History, to use color negative film to record the historic events of his tenure. That was a earmark I noticed in my youth, and JFK's courage rubbed off on me to push at an art form that, in art gallery values, was glazed with short-sightedness, considered a medium most unpopular, and uncollectible, at the time. I had settled on working with color negative film, and C-Type Prints, versus the more stable (and popular) chrome films, and the developing additive printing processes. My reasons were simple – I let my eyes be my judge… I was always drawn to tonality - Primary and Secondary. After many childhood family trips through New Mexico, the power of what I call, 'Epitome Colors,' had forever augmented my perceptions. As soon as I pulled my first color print, around the beginning of 1972, I discovered the, 'essence of epitome coloring,' mixed throughout the particles and atmosphere within the landscape. It has always kept me striving to sharpen my skills of perception and capture."

    "I began my serious wildlife, and landscape work, in the mid-1970's; I moved into the fine art of imagery in the mid-1980's, and then dived into sculpture in the early 1990's. I explored editorial documentary photography during the late 1990's. I trained myself, via PhotoShop, from 1996, to finally grow my photo-art into, 'Complete Digital Deliveries,' into the early 2000's. Presently, my "Digital Artifacts," continue to progress, as I grasp for new terminology to discuss my work, and its medium. Older art terms no longer seem to fit this new realm of digital technology, and it's place in Art's History - now in the making - so the, "Speak," continues be amended..."

    "Born a third-generation Dallasite, I finally decided that 40 years of big city life was enough for me... Since 1993, I have lived, and worked, on a small 50-acre farm, 75 miles north, and west, of downtown Fort Worth, Texas. I live in the big old middle of a nowhere you have ever heard of. In fact, on my Texas Driver's License - it just reads: Rural, Texas... That, my friends, is as good a place to do art as any - however, socially speaking - it sucks... Finally, while I never caught up with my dream to be a singer-songwriter - I did learn to express my music visually..."

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"Tree Shadows - Perrin Farm" © 1996 Brad Michael Moore

BMM

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