About

Don’t Miss This: A Decade of Eccentric Performing Arts is Jim R. Moore’s pictorial paean to the stars of today’s circus, sideshow, burlesque, and new vaudeville scenes. In these pages, you will find the world’s most eccentric extended family: clowns, acrobats, thespians, musicians, contortionists, jugglers, puppeteers, ventriloquists, daredevils, aerialists, opera singers, drag stars, monologists, impresarios, magicians, impressionists, fire-eaters, nuts, and acts of the sort we still don’t have any polite name for. Taken between 2010 and 2020, the photos capture such latter-day performing giants as Lawrence Pisoni (founder of the legendary Pickle Family Circus), Circus Amok’s “Woman with a Beard” Jennifer Miller, bouffon artist Red Bastard, drag king Murray Hill, sideshow star Todd Robbins, Tom Murrin (a.k.a. The Alien Comic), Avner the Eccentric, burlesque queens like Julie Atlas Muz and the Wau Wau Sisters, and performance artists like Penny Arcade and Reno. In addition, inside you will also find essays by the likes of John Towsen (author of the seminal book Clowns), and performance artists Paul Zaloom, Pat Oleszko, and Michael Smith.

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“Jim Moore has photo-documented at least an entire generation of my kind of performers, within the confines of a single decade. This book is a treasury of memories!” - HOVEY BURGESS, educator; author, Circus Techniques

“An extraordinary collection of images that will serve as the definitive visual legacy for a decade of live performance.” - MARK LONERGAN, artistic director, Parallel Exit

“I salute my friend Jim Moore for always being present where the action is and for his talent at extracting the essence of a performing scene. Bravo, well done!” - PHILIPPE PETIT, high wire artist

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ABOUT JIM R. MOORE

After a youth spent delivering newspapers and founding Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond fan clubs, Jim R. Moore attended NYU Film School and the School of Visual Arts. He began his career as a professional photographer for the rock ‘n’ roll magazines Zygote and Crawdaddy, where his subjects included the Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull, Rod Stewart, and the Rolling Stones. During this time, he also captured now-iconic images for Philippe Petit’s World Trade Center high-wire walk, and continued his own work as a street performer. This led to his subsequent career as a passionate and prolific documenter of “the eccentric performing arts.” He has photographed the Movement Theater Mime Clown Festival, Circus Flora, the Big Apple Circus, Cirque d’Hiver, and the Festival of Fools; and served as photographer in residence for the American Mime Theatre. His photography has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Time Out, Dance Magazine, and in numerous books and public exhibitions. In 2009, he launched the website Vaudevisuals, where many of the photographs in this book first appeared. In 2019, he founded Vaudevisuals Press, which has published A Clown in Our Town: A Tribute to Rob Torres, Rose’s Royal Midgets and Other Little People of Vaudeville, and Don't Miss This. John Towsen, author of Clowns: A Panoramic History, wrote in his introduction to Jim’s 2011 exhibit “The Clown UnMasked”: “Like all fine photographers, Jim has more than just a keen eye and polished technique. He has an instinctual feel for his subjects, and, above all, their total trust.” Jim lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the dancer, fiddle player, and mom, Deborah Monlux.