Gabriel Moses for GUAP 23: A Maven in the Making

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BY Terna Jogo

August 4, 2021

Meet Gabriel Moses – a director and photographer who is cementing himself as an image maker to be reckoned with.

When I meet Gabriel for the first time on the day of the cover shoot, he exudes a calm and relaxed energy. His level headed persona allows him to ebb and flow with the opportunities and challenges that have come his way Gabriel tells me, “I take everything as it comes, so whether good or bad, I have a very kind of level attitude to things, so anything disappointing, I’m just like this is supposed to happen, this is just a part of the journey, and anything good as well I’m like it’s also supposed to happen, because I feel like this kind of stuff is written and you’re just kind of living your story.”

Starting out making videos with his friends about people in sports for his YouTube channel Young Athlete TV, Gabriel caught the attention of Nike who brought him on to direct a campaign at just 18-years-old. This opened the door to work with other big brand names and in the space of a few years Gabriel has established a career of someone double his age.

Since then Gabriel has gone on to be the youngest photographer to ever shoot a Dazed Cover with Pa Salieu, has created a short film with Samuel Ross for Converse and now is looking forward to his first solo exhibition of Ijó at the iconic 180 strand.

He attributes his drive and the quick trajectory of his career to his upbringing in South London, “Being from south London, I feel like there’s a certain drive we have, where we’ve kind of got this idea that if you can learn it, we’ll learn it, and we’ll be really good at it. You see things like that in football, the massive representation of footballers that come from South London, I feel like there’s just a certain personality to us and confidence that yeah, we have in ourselves.”

Themes of home, family and community run throughout his work which has a beautiful and intentional simplicity about it, “everything was always around the importance of community and family, those are two things that I always hold super close. A lot of my work is inspired by my old family photos and thing like that, whether it’s the colours, or the setups or the poses or things like that.” said Gabriel, also citing City of God as one of the films he saw that really stuck with him, “it just had a mad authentic energy to it.”

You might think that having big ideas and executing them for big names at such a young age is daunting, especially when your knowledge of what you’re doing is limited but for Gabriel sometimes there is power in knowing nothing as he tells me, “I feel like I’ve approached my work with this almost like childish ignorance”, and to master yourself you must believe in yourself and your vision even when no one else might “I always felt like I knew what a nice image was, and I always just trusted that and had the confidence to step in rooms and say like this is my vision and this is how I see it going. Even at times when people didn’t agree, I’d go away and make my own stuff and allow people to understand this is my style.”

When I ask Gabriel what’s next?, in his laidback way he tells me that getting better is all he cares about, “I just want to keep on doing my job as well as possible.”

The full cover story will be available to watch tomorrow on GUAP’s YouTube channel and IGTV.

Follow Gabriel on Instagram