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............biograf.doc
Martyn
William Moore was born near Malton, North Yorkshire in England
on the 23rd of April 1961.
Martyn left Norton School at 16 with five 'O' levels. He joined a local civil engineering company and trained as a draughtsman. After three years of training and studying at Leeds Polytechnic he started working in the company's drawing office and hated it. Within six months he had managed to obtain a transfer to the marketing department.
It was here that Martyn first studied photography and gained valuable experience writing press releases for construction industry magazines and local newspapers.
In 1981 the firm lost a vital contract in the Middle East and with recession hitting the construction industry hard the company had to reduce its work force. Martyn was made redundant and given a £2000 pay-off.
He spent the money on a new camera – a Yashica FX3 – and a big motorcycle – a Kawasaki Z1R. Both purchases were significant; they were to determine his future.
For the next three years Martyn eked out a living painting exotic designs (monsters, naked women and Clint Eastwood) on motorbikes, crash helmets and the occasional car and van. His paintwork won several trophies at custom shows in the north of England. He worked from a small lock-up behind a pub in Norton, North Yorkshire. Truth be told, he spent more time in the pub than in his workshop.
Martyn was also taking lots of photographs. He developed and printed his own pictures and sold them to the local paper – the Malton Gazette & Herald – often writing short articles to accompany the photographs. He made a few quid photographing local sports teams (his dad was nuts about soccer and cricket) and helping a local wedding photographer also helped pay the rent.
But he was still too young and daft to make any real progress and after a succession of temporary jobs (council grass cutter, water meter reader, petrol pump attendant, coffin varnisher) and brushes with the law (arson, firearms... nothing serious and never charged) he applied to a cruise ship photography firm for a job taking pictures on liners.
In April
1984 he joined the Scotia Prince sailing from Portland, Maine
in the US to Nova Scotia in Canada, taking photographs of Americans
on holiday. As the junior photographer on board he had to dress
up as a gorilla every day. One woman complained that Martyn in
his gorilla suit shocked her so much she fell over, hurt her foot
and allegedly received $30,000 for loss of earnings and psychological
trauma. It could only happen in America.
By November of that same year Martyn was in Sydney, Australia boarding P&O's Oriana to cruise the Far East and South Pacific.
Martyn stayed with Oriana until she was taken out of commission in 1986. He spent the next six months in Sydney and Brisbane where he picked up the odd freelance commission from local newspapers and TV stations. A motorcycle trip into the bush brought him his first major magazine article. Superbike magazine in Britain published his account of a journey through the outback on a battered old Suzuki GS750.
Much of 1987 was spent cruising the Caribbean, South America, Mediterranean, Scandinavia, the Baltic and the Arctic to give Martyn's photographic portfolio a truly global perspective. But in October 1987 his ship was battered in the Bay of Biscay by the horrific storm that went on to decimate much of southern England. He did one more trip before giving up the merchant navy lark.
Just a couple of weeks after returning to England Martyn applied for a job as a feature writer on Practical Photography magazine. The then editor's wife snatched his letter from the reject pile because "he sounded like a bit of a laugh". He got the job.
By 1989 he had been promoted to features editor and in November of that year he accompanied a group of Practical Photography readers to the Pushkar Camel Fair in India. During the last week of the trip, whilst camping in the desert, Martyn was woken in the middle of the night by a taxi driver who had driven 40 miles to the camp with a telegram. The message was from his editor and it told him that on his arrival back in London he was to proceed immediately to HMS Belfast by Tower Bridge.
He turned up at the officers' mess looking a mess, but just in time to hear his name announced as the Periodical Training Council's Trainee Journalist of the Year. This dramatic entrance made the front page of the Malton Gazette & Herald back home in Yorkshire.
In 1991, after six months
as assistant editor on Practical Photography, Martyn left to edit
Bike magazine. He relaunched the motorcycle title, taking it slightly
up-market to cater for the more mature, discerning biker. His
background allowed him to place a much greater emphasis on photography
and the spirit of motorcycling – bikes in huge landscapes;
bikes as objects of desire.
Martyn's efforts earned him the accolade Editor of the Year 1992 from the British Society of Magazine Editors and in 1993 he was runner-up PPA Editor of the Year. During his four years in office, the monthly sales of Bike went from 35,000 to 71,000.
He returned to photography magazines as managing editor of Photo Answers and Buying Cameras magazines. In 1996 Martyn took over the editorship of Practical Photography to give it a smart new look and its first circulation increase in six years.
Since October 1997 Martyn has played a consultancy-type role at EMAP. As editor-in-chief at EMAP Apex he worked on the launch of Digital PhotoFX magazine, contributed to the editorial content of pets, gardening and railway titles and meddled with some very secret, very scary special projects.
In spring 1998 Martyn went to Max Power magazine, Britain's biggest motoring magazine, as caretaker editor to oversee production and help with staff development during the search for a permanent editor.
Martyn
Moore uses Nikon cameras and rides a custom-built Kawasaki Zephyr 1100 motorcycle. He lives in Peterborough,
England with Laura, his partner, and their two daughters, Charlotte and Katy.
0468 261276words | photographs | home | charlotte's web pages
© all pictures martyn moore 1998
