Vennie Deas-Moore

bio

As a documentary photographer, Vennie Deas Moore’s camera records stories; one image connecting to the next. When she first became a photographer/writer, she studied the 1930s photographers/writers like Julia Peterkin, Zora Neale Hurston, Doris Ulmann, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans. She was taken by the stories told in the faces of people in the era of the Great Depression. While these photographs often contained faces, they were usually nameless. With her Young South Carolinians series Deas Moore is focusing on young people in downtown Columbia, South Carolina. She says, “perhaps many years later, they, too, will tell a story.”

Vennie Deas Moore was a research specialist in Immunology at MUSC in the early 1980’s. In 1984, she left Charleston to work in Washington, DC. where she worked at George Washington University in Cancer Research. It was there, she said, where she was “bitten by the Folk-life Bug.” She attended George Washington University to study American Studies.

She returned back to South Carolina, to University of South Carolina as a guest curator at McKissick Museum. There she became a folk life photographer and writer. She has published numerous articles and books, notably, Home: Portraits from the Carolina Coast.