Best of 2008

by 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.