Teasdale, Paul, Moyra Davey, Frieze, #44, London ... - Greengrassi

BEST BOOKS OF 2008
SHANNON EBNER
If a writer’s style can be characterized as
photographic, then this is how I would refer to
Moyra Davey’s stylistic approach in her essay
“Notes on Photography & Accident.” Published on
the occasion of the artist’s first museum exhibition
(at Harvard’s Fogg, curated by Helen
Molesworth), Long Life Cool White is a small,
elegantly designed paperback that neither feels
nor reads like a typical catalogue.
Davey’s writing is scholarly while never losing sight of a more personal and notational expository
drift. And it is precisely this drift that grants her prose its photographic quality. Taking up the
question of whether the notion of accident may hope to retain its relevance, Davey looks to
Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Janet Malcolm, each of whom has mined
this history of analog slippages in his or her texts. Through their writing, Davey locates
precedence for a renewed interest in the camera’s mechanical mishaps. One gets the sense that
Davey, in casting herself into the interstitial spaces of thought, is not so much thinking about
things as thinking between them. As an example, among Davey’s notes are ideas about
photography’s ascending market value and correlative expansion of scale; Benjamin’s idea of the
optical unconscious in relation to psychoanalysis; Davey’s own declining health; and, finally,
thoughts on the drive to take photographs in the “real,” as opposed to the imagined (read: staged)
world at all. Definitive conclusions are not necessarily what Davey values.
What readers may find of value, however, are Davey’s photographs, in particular her
“Copperheads” series, 1990–92. Here, the distressed surfaces of pennies, the lowliest form of
currency, are surveyed by the camera’s uncompromising lens, investing the cent with the exploits
of visual information not commonly bestowed upon it.
Perhaps what struck me most about this book was Davey’s low-grade anxiety about analog
photographic technologies on the cusp of obsolescence. In her summary of the quotes (from
Barthes, Sontag, et al.) that began her journey into the topic of “Photography & Accident,” Davey
formulates the proposition that “accident is the lifeblood of photography.” If we are to accept this
claim, one may ask, what will it mean for the medium when photography loses touch with the
analog—which requires, at the very least, an actual subject, even if inanimate—and so
surrenders some control to the fate of a mechanical camera? Will photography be leached of life,
or will the notion of accident merely undergo a radical redefinition? In medias res, this pun is
intended.
Shannon Ebner is an artist based in Los Angeles.