BY PAMELA KEECH
Fun for David Moore means learning something new. At 53 he has constructed a life that is wide open to that definition. Two loves, medicine and photography, were the starting place.
Moore moved to Bloomington as a high school freshman with his parents, Carroll and Donna Moore. The family owns CarDon & Associates, which operates several senior-care facilities, including Bell Trace here in Bloomington. He met his future wife, Martha Hays, when he was a senior at Bloomington High School North and she was a student at South. After high school he served in the U.S. Air Force, then enrolled at Case Western Reserve University, married Martha, and began following his dream of becoming a doctor. Medical studies, however, did not go well. As Moore puts it, “Organic chemistry was my downfall.”
His trademark of tackling adversity with creativity kicked in. “I realized that I wasn’t going to be a physician but that there were lots of ways to help people and take care of their needs.” He joined the family business and is now director of strategic planning, pursuing innovations in care and comfort for seniors.
Moore has been exploring his second love, landscape photography, since he was a kid, using what he remembers as “toy cameras.” His first professional camera, and still favorite, was a Minolta Maxxum 9xi. He shoots strictly digital now, though he still hasn’t quite gotten used to “the computer as darkroom.”
As he approached 50, Moore, frustrated by the dearth of photographs in art galleries, especially in the Midwest, decided to start a gallery devoted solely to photography. In 2008, pictura gallery opened at the corner of 6th Street and North College on the downtown Square. “We want to introduce contemporary photography to the community and help people discover what a great photograph is,” says Moore. In its three years of existence, pictura gallery has exhibited the works of many of America’s finest photographers and gained a national reputation.
Modest about his own work, Moore rarely shows his photographs in the gallery. However, the staff—wife Martha, Brenda Stern, and Lisa Berry—are taking a stand: There will be a David Moore exhibition at pictura in 2012.
