In Focus: Si Moore
Si Moore is a photographer from Auckland, New Zealand who spends a lot of time traversing the globe shooting street-scapes on medium format film on obsolete old cameras and then praying that it works out. Here's our short conversation with this incredibly passionate Kiwi.
Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do?
My name is Si Moore, I live in Auckland - a city on the North Island of Aoteaora/New Zealand - and I’m a photographer.
I mostly shoot people in love with my wife Sophia for our company Bayly & Moore, but we also shoot all sorts of other interesting things just for kicks. I’m also pretty obsessed with analog image-making - ie, shooting on film - and the different head-space and processes that go along with the analog world.
Describe your creative background and how that has aided to hone your photography vision
I grew up on a farm in the South Island of New Zealand. Yeah, a sheep farm. Okay. I went to a country school that didn’t have much goin’ on but there was one great teacher - a music teacher, Mr Hill - and pretty much because of him I spent the next 15 or so years playing music, making records, touring all over the world, and doin all the stuff you do when you’re trying to make a living out of music. It was mostly playing guitar as a sideman with solo artists, but the occasional band thrown in there too.
And then I met Sophia, and we were both starting to get into photography, and from there I ditched music and became obsessed with visual mediums - film-making, photography, scrambling eggs… you know, all the great visual mediums.
The thing that became apparent to me early on after I switched from music to image-making was that the rules of making art really don’t change from discipline to discipline. Once you’ve figured out what a good process looks like and how you can form ideas into actions, it pretty much applies across the board. AT least… that’s what I’ve been telling myself for the last 10 years. So I hope it does.
The more I consider it, I realise I’m actually in love with the creative space that film forces you into
Your collection on Kolla are all shot on film. What is it about film that excites you?
I started shooting film when I was pretty disillusioned with the crazy colour fads that were everywhere in digital photography - and especially in the wedding industry that we were a part of - and I realised that all of the photographers who’s work and colour style I really loved (people like Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Fred Herzog, Todd Hido, Saul Leiter etc) had stuck with one film emulsion for most of their body of work and it had given them an ability to understand colour and tone that lent a tremendous consistency to their work. So I grabbed one of our old Rolleiflexes, committed to Kodak Portra 400, and got down to work. And I found I really loved the constraint, the lack of a feedback loop, and a bunch of the other analog processes that go along with working solely on film. Also composing in squares with a Rolleiflex and shooting street photography by looking down into the camera rather than holding it up to my face all lent a certain voice to the images that really appealed to me… and don’t even get me started on those beautiful low contrast Rollei lenses that let shoot in the hardest sunlight.
To get a little geeky about it, if you’ve got eyes then you’ve been influenced by how film captures light - plain and simple. If you grew up watching feature films or documentaries, or reading National Geographic or Time magazine, then the way those handful of film stocks see light is a key part of your visual calibration - and if you didn’t grow up in that era, then I can pretty much guarantee that whoever’s inspiring you and feeding you with visual content did grow up in that era.
I mean, in some ways it’s a simple as saying that I just love the way film looks, but the more I consider it I realise I’m actually in love with the creative space that film forces you into. You end up shooting in a way that you’d never shoot with a digital machine, and you get a result that is a beautiful marriage of light, an old camera, and a modern piece of chemistry. Pure magic.
How does your photography approach differ between personal and professional work?
I tend to shoot commissioned work mostly on digital and am very focused on story-telling, and that medium works beautifully for that purpose. You can be risky and explore ideas very quickly and let yourself become a little more invisible. But with personal work I’m shooting on film using old Rolleiflex cameras and usually testing and refining a very small set of ideas. I like to think of it as trying to gain deep understanding of just a handful of compositions, rather than trying to establish a wide-ranging skill-set.
It’s also wonderful to have all of my personal work in a whole different analog workflow, so it goes off to the lab and it’s a different headspace to the deadline driven digital world that our commissioned work occupies. There’s a joy in simply just firing the shutter and knowing that you’re not adding to the processing pile.
Image: Green Mercedes
Do you ever feel content with your photography output?
Ha! No, never. Does anyone? I mean there’s plenty of satisfying milestones along the way that make you feel like what you’re doing is significant, but ‘content’? Not at all. Mostly I just feel frustrated, but the kind of frustration that drives you back out to keep creating and trying again. I think of it the same as fly-fishing (another obsession of mine) where even the worst day out on the water when your casting’s terrible and there’s no fish just makes you lie awake at night dreaming of getting back out there and having another crack at it. That dream result is always waiting just around the next bend in the river. Hopefully.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to master a certain kind of double exposure on film, using textures and shapes to build a portrait ‘language’ that can help tell the story of someone. And the method of doing it is suitably hit and miss (with a long time to wait and find out if you nailed it) that it keeps you alive with the possibility that you might’ve finally got it right, but always tempered with the reality that you probably need another 100 rolls of film to get it right.
Image: Baltic Window
What is one thing you're obsessed with right now?
Fly-fishing! And scrambling eggs. I grew up fly-fishing on the rivers near the family farm in New Zealand and I’ve recently got back into it. It’s such a beautifully zen-like way to experience the outdoors and to be acutely aware of the environment you’re in, not to mention the physics of mastering casting. It really does feel like you’re trying to do a beautiful thing in a beautiful place, regardless of whether the fish play ball or not.
And I’m always obsessed with cooking things, but not cooking flash chef kinda things, more just the chemistry of executing really simple things really well. Like perfectly scrambling eggs… so many factors, so many variables. #delicious
Feel the film vibes throughout Si's incredible work and shop his Kolla collection today.
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