Long Life Cool White: : Photographs by Moyra Davey is the artist’s first major museum exhibition. In both her photographs and her writings, she exhibits a fascination with the ability of the photograph to stop time, to focus attention. Her pictures of objects from everyday life are at once emotionally cool, operating in the rigorous documentary school of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and curiously poignant in their enumeration of the lowly and the banal, often evoking the French photographers Eugène Atget and Jacques Boiffard. She maintains an interest in traditional photography’s reliance upon the notion of accident, what Henri Cartier-Bresson would call “the decisive moment.” But far from the heroic stance of the street photographer ever at the ready, Davey is a subtle chronicler of the domestic interior: the dust under the bed, stacks of books and LPs, the nearly mindless accumulation of objects in the process of becoming historical relics before our very eyes. Counter to the now suffocating effects of digitization on traditional analog photography, Davey remains steadfast in using film and in working at a modest scale, allowing her to print her own color photographs.

Like so many contemporary photographers, Davey works in series, as she is interested in photography’s intrinsic embrace of repetition. Her numerous images of books, for instance, suggest the seemingly limitless quality of writing and reading, of knowledge and its pleasures, as well as sparking a hint of anxiety at the recognition that none of us can ever read or know all that we might want to.

In addition to the exhibition in the Fogg of her work, Davey’s 50 Minutes, her first major foray into video, will be shown next door at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in an exhibition entitled Two or Three Things I Know About Her. That exhibition will feature the work of a group of loosely aligned younger artists working in New York on the shared concerns of urbanism, sexuality, and politics. It is my hope that the two exhibitions will give Davey long overdue credit as a subtle and nuanced photographer while also placing her squarely within some of the most adventurous art of our moment. Her ability to straddle both terrains conveys the depth and sensitivity of her practice.

Helen Molesworth
Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art