Watch Photographer Atom Moore’s New Prints Merge Horology and Nature

Atom Moore has become the world’s most renowned watch photographer for good reason: He has gone far beyond standard “watch shots” into the realm of creative art, and in so doing, has redefined what watch photography can be. In demand from the likes of Vacheron Constantin , Tudor , Massena LAB , and many other brands, Moore’s straight product work has become ubiquitous, but his many art installations—in which he typically mashes up macro photos of watch elements—have toured the world, earning him a special credibility with high-end collectors and enthusiasts alike.

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Moore has also collaborated on a few watches, one stemming from his long-standing relationship with Germany’s Moritz Grossmann . The Atom Moore 37 , a limited edition with impressive horological credentials and a whimsical “atomic” dial that is silver plated using friction, is now fetching big bucks on the pre-owned market.

This month, Moore is mounting a brand new solo show at his alma mater, Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts, and a limited run of prints will be available for sale to the public through his website .

We spoke with Moore about his new work, what inspired it, and how he went about creating it.

How did you decide to start putting watches and flowers together?

Photographing macro shots of watches is just sort of what I enjoy doing. Small, mechanical things up close are fascinating to me. And then I started visiting a place near where I live in the Bronx called Wave Hill, this beautiful, publicly accessible garden that’s on this hillside overlooking the Hudson River, and it has a unique climate, and they have constant variation of plants from all over the world. And I just started exploring it with my macro lens.

Because of my previous mashup artwork that I’ve done where I take watch parts [from different watches] and put them together, I was looking at the macro photos of plants, and I was thinking, “Oh, what if I crossed over these elements of these watch photos that I’ve taken? Movement parts that have swoopy angles and things like that. And I saw all these different elements, and I thought about how time changes for watches and clocks, and how time moving forward affects plants, and what you see every day is different. And so I just brought them together and explored that.

When you were constructing the compositions, how did you go about that?

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Finding the watch image and finding the plant image that I want to put together is akin to me printing in the dark room. It’s like a meditative kind of scenario for me, where I’m exploring. In the dark room, I’m figuring out how I want the print to look. I’m dodging, I’m burning, and I’m watching the print itself materialize in front of my eyes as I’m developing it. Since this show is going up at my almamater, the darkroom was on my mind. This is being all done digitally now. So I’m taking the elements of the watch that I like, and I’m taking the elements of the plant, or plants that I like, and I’m putting them together, and I’m mixing them around, and I’m dodging and burning and I’m figuring out what speaks to me.

Tell me about the watches you’ve shot. These are serious watches.

I actually tended to gravitate towards high-end, independent-made watches. So there are brands like F.P. Journe and, you know, there’s a Gyrotourbillon from Jaeger-LeCoultre . The high-end independent world is, for my aesthetic, what I really gravitate to in my personal liking of watches. So it makes sense that I’ve chosen some of those images to become the art pieces, because I already see artistry inside of the art that I already think watches are. I’ve been fortunate enough to photograph watches like Romain Gauthier’s Logical One , his homage to fusé-and-chain style architecture, and I’ve had the opportunity to photograph that in such a way that I can see what I want to see out of it. I can present to the viewer the view that their normal eye would not be able to see.

And do you find that the level of artistry and finishing, especially on those high-end independent watches, makes for better images?

I would say that it’s the finishing on high-end watches, whether they’re independents or from larger brands like JLC. Every single thing is thought about, and every single surface has a finish on it that is deliberate. It’s not just like, “Okay, we didn’t know what to do here, so we added this frosting finish to it.” If that frosted finish is there, it’s because they specifically wanted it there. If they polished some part of the link of that chain, it’s because they specifically wanted to spend the time to make it a polished surface so that your eye would see it in a different way. So I really think that there’s a more obvious intentionality behind higher-end watches.

Moore prints his watch-related artwork using a dye sublimation process onto aluminum sheets. In this process, the highlights of the photograph are left unprinted such that the exposed aluminum becomes the brightest part of the image, which lends the prints a unique, metallic quality.

Moore’s work will appear at Fitchburg State University as part of an ongoing alumni project , and a portion of proceeds from sales of the 15 prints will flow back into the photography department there. Moore says these prints, plus others, will be available in limited quantities on his website from later this month.

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