Chad Moore first stepped behind a lens when he was 15 years old, professionally BMX biking. “It’s crazy my mum let me do it, but I would go on road trips with some of the older guys. There’s always a photographer in a van and someone filming, and one guy gave me a point-and-shoot camera. You always just document everything.” After decades of capturing life experiences, portrait making seems to be second nature to Moore. Whether the subject is in bed, at the club, or beside a fire hydrant, the New York-based photographer’s work possesses an intimate human essence.

In his new book, Eyes and Skies, he expands the idea of intimacy – zooming into the irises of many previously-photographed friends and gazing out at galaxies across the globe. “There’s a kind of truth in people’s eyes in a photograph,” he tells Dazed. For Moore, the eyes are vehicles of communication, indicating trust between him, the lens, and the subject. The book lays the optic stills side-by-side with astral skyscapes and sunsets outside his New York home.

Moore felt drawn to the cosmos during Covid, which led him to create his previous book Anybody Anyway. “I started doing the sky photos because I was tired of waiting around,” he explains. With the stars as an ever-recurring subject, Moore found himself capturing them in moments of peace and boredom alike. While in the Atacama desert in Chile, he was captivated by the stelliferous plane, “You can see the Milky Way with your eyes. It has a human quality to it.” Looking out at the emptiness of the galaxy can make us feel small, but when positioned next to our own oculi, you can’t help but draw similarities. The textured, coloured waves across the iris, contrasting the gaping black pupil in the centre, don’t seem so different from the sparkling, celestial horizon.

Meeting the subject’s gaze feels as though you’re lying in bed with them. The picture becomes clearer when Moore mentions plans of a ‘breath’ scented perfume in the works. “It’s kind of like the first kiss or something. That weird thing where your breath doesn’t smell like anything. You smell like a human – not good nor bad. It’s sweet.” The smell of a lover, the primal instinct to analyse someone’s eyes, and being a part of the same macrocosm are what innately connect us and why Moore’s work can feel so personal. “I aim to affect people and make them feel something. Photography is not really something that I’m interested in as a medium. It’s just more of my way of relating to the world in that way.”

His organic and tangible approach adds to the humanity of his work. “It’s kind of like taking a Polaroid when your friends come over and you put it on your fridge,” he says about the ocular portraits. “I’m very sentimental, so I love saving things like prints and stuff. I save receipts from movies that I went to with someone, so photography is kind of an extension of that.” He emphasises that he tries not to be too referential, aside from his in-person journeys to the New York Public Library, where he xeroxes photos from their picture collection. “It’s kind of the original Google.”

Moore also captured Olivia Rodrigo’s new album cover, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, and for The Unravelled Tour. “Olivia is literally the coolest person I’ve ever been asked to photograph,” he tells Dazed. The process was entirely collaborative and organic. “It seems like it’d be more complicated than it was. We talked about some ideas and then I went to LA and we just started taking pictures.” The project was surreal for Moore because the photos felt authentic to him as a result of their frictionless development. “It feels crazy because it looks like my work, which is rare with things like this, and that’s what she wanted. We wanted something genuine.” 

As Moore’s work moves towards the heavens, the feeling remains grounded in quiet glimmers of life and human moments. “I take photos of everything because I like the idea of someone relating to my images and thinking, ‘I've felt this way.’ They’ve made out at a club or looked up at the sky in the same way.”

Eyes and Skies by Chad Moore is published by Super Labo and is out now.