February 28 through June 30, 2008
Fogg Art Museum (more about the Fogg)

Moyra Davey, Shure, 2003. Chromogenic color print, 24 x 20 in. Collection of the artist. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

This exhibition presents an overview of artist and writer Moyra Davey’s 20-year career summarized in 40 photographs. Her modest images—newspapers, books, money, empty bottles, and the accumulation of objects on the tops of refrigerators—prick us into a state of increased awareness about the everyday life that both surrounds us and that we are immersed in. Her work stands as a quiet, passionate rejoinder to the hyper-staged quality of much contemporary photography, which Davey sees as bound up with the intense commercialization of the art world.

In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Davey has written an essay entitled “Notes on Photography and Accident,” a rumination on the themes of death, suicide, and time that run through the writings on photography of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Janet Malcolm, and Susan Sontag. Davey’s video 50 Minutes is part of the exhibition Two or Three Things I Know About Her at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, at 24 Quincy Street next door to the Fogg and on view through April 6, 2008.

Organized by Helen Molesworth, Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art. Funding for the exhibition and catalogue were provided by the Alexander S., Robert L., and Bruce A. Beal Exhibition Fund; Wynn Kramarsky; and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.