Chad Moore’s new book Oh, You gathers exceptionally tender portraits of the New Yorker’s friends, shot over the past two years
It’s 8am in London and 5pm in Tokyo when Chad Moore answers the phone. The indistinct clamour of a restaurant in Jinbocho is heard in the background, a pretty neighbourhood where niche bookstores and independent publishers are interspersed through a grid of winding streets. Moore is there for the launch of his second project with cult publishing house Super Labo, the party for which gets going in less than an hour. “I first came to Tokyo with Ryan McGinley in 2012,” he says. “He was doing his first big exhibition out here and he brought me and our friend Kyle as a gift. We stayed at the Park Hyatt where they filmed Lost in Translation and all three of us slept in one California king bed. It was the best introduction to the city.”
Moore has been to Tokyo countless times since. On this occasion, it’s to celebrate the launch of Oh, You, an exhibition and book gathering exceptionally tender portraits of the New Yorker’s friends shot over the past two years. It marks a follow-up to Anybody Anyway, his first book with Super Labo’s Yasunori Hoki, which explored ideas of connection in the wake of Covid through gentle portraiture and spectral shots of the night’s sky. “It’s so cool to be able to work with Yasunori,” Moore says. “When he emailed me about the first book I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ He’s one of those guys when you’re a young photographer that you dream of doing a book with,” adding, far too self-effacingly; “I just like never thought to hit him up because it seemed out of my league.”
Exhibited in galleries around the world, Moore is an exceptional talent who has spent the past decade and a half photographing the personal worlds of those closest to him. “I’m an only child so when I moved to New York 16 years ago, I made a group of friends that are like my family,” the Tampa-born photographer explains. “Photography has always been my way of connecting, of showing adoration for the people that I love. I’m always taking photos.”
Moore’s work is often associated with the years of youth. Full of adrenaline-charged nights, tight embraces on apartment floors, and bleary-eyed sunrises on rooftops, it’s true that few have captured the ecstatic rush of being a 20-something in New York City with an immediacy as vivid as he has. Now though, as the photographer enters his mid-30s, things are a bit different. Documenting a perceptible shift, Oh, You follows his friends as they ground into new stages of connection, navigate love and loss, and contemplate what comes next in their lives. “Now all the people in my photos are older, and I’m older, so it’s not really about youth,” he explains. “It’s capturing the same moments but in different ways.”
Still documenting late nights, laughter through clouds of cigarette smoke, and childishness in the streets – a particularly great shot sees one friend smile angelically as she pees on the pavement – some pictures in the book also have a wistfulness to them. Friends embrace at a memorial, shed tears in cabs, and show marks on bodies that have lived – from the healed scars of stupid accidents to the stretch marks made by a baby bump. “We’ve all gone through so much together,” Moore says. “There’s a picture in this book of our friend Mara who passed away two years ago, and there’s also a picture of my friends hugging at her memorial. When you get older, things start to [change]. It’s more about a mentality and looking at the world in a certain way and not being scared of the future.”
Another change brought about by age is that Moore has stopped waiting for things to happen. He bought a special wrench for opening fire hydrants on Amazon, using it once in the summer to capture his friends Emi and Chase making out as water gushes over them, and another time in the depths of winter. “The first time I got the wrench it was in February so it was really cold,” he says. “I was with my friend Simona and she was like, ‘I’m down to get in the water. I don’t care.’ We shot an entire roll of film in ten seconds. It’s the one where it looks like she has angel wings, towards the end of the book.”
In many ways, the book is about not taking things for granted, whether it’s the company of a friend who might not be here next year or the beauty of a tree that only blooms for a few days each spring. “The cover of the book is one of my favourite shots,” he says, a naked portrait of his girlfriend Delaney pausing before an explosion of pink blossom. “There’s a really massive tree by my house in Chinatown but it only looks like that for like a day before the leaves fall off. We had to do it at 5am and really quickly so we wouldn’t get arrested for public indecency. We just blasted off one roll of film and that was it.”
At the end of our call, I ask if Moore’s feelings about New York have changed with time. It’s a place he has been rooted to for so long, that feels so bound up with his work, but that has also transformed amid a turbulent America. “New York City is an ever-evolving ecosystem of craziness,” he says. “As you get older, it’s a wild way of living. But all my family are my friends, and they’re all in New York. So that’s where I stay.”
Oh, You by Chad Moore is published by Super Labo, and is out now.