Tag: Andrew Moore

“Alabama, the place in these pages, my home, us not exotic,” writes Imani Perri in the preface to Andrew Moore’s new monograph Blue Alabama (Damiani). “Sometimes Alabama is a punchline, or a word used to provoke horror. I have seen pages of words and pictures filled with my birth state, an abundant canvas for the American imagination, many times—the work of artists and poets, writers and intellectuals. This prolificity is at least in part because Alabama is the imagined grounds for our national shame, a heady mix of poverty and violence: guns, lynching, beatings, and, most of all, racism. Slavery! Alabama might be the true heartland of America after all.”

Andrew Moore is a veteran New Yorker accustomed to claustrophobic and overstimulated environments. Perhaps that’s why a visit to North Dakota in 2005, and an encounter with the arid, expansive and mostly desolate lands of the 100th meridian, appealed to him as it had homesteaders in years past.

Andrew Moore began taking photographs along the Meridian in 2005. He became captivated by the rural communities and the diverse terrain, and soon befriended a number of people who live there. He spent nine years documenting life on the land, where the daily reality is often defined by drought and hardship

Andrew Moore has spent eight years photographing the area west of the 100th meridian, the territory formerly known as the Great American Desert, which remains one of the most sparsely populated regions in the country. Here, a homestead built around 1890, in Sheridan County, Neb.