Language, death and love are active elements in Moyra Davey’s photography exhibition, “My Necropolis,” at Murray Guy. Like many other shows now, it has a retrospective cast, with work dating back to 1990: close-up pictures of pennies worn and scratched, taken after the late-’80s stock market debacle; others of the artist’s obsolete record collection; still others of whiskey bottles left by departed drinkers.

The new work, done in France this year, includes similar still-lifes, but centers on a video the artist made in Paris cemeteries, a meandering tour in which the camera lingers over the tombs of celebrities — Stendhal, François Truffaut, Gertrude Stein — in Père Lachaise, but dwells on epitaphs and details of more modest monuments too.

On the soundtrack we hear voices discussing a passage from a letter by the philosopher Walter Benjamin. He wrote it in 1931, when he was broke, lonely and depressed, to tell a friend how he had become fixated on the sight of a public clock across the street from his apartment. He found himself looking at it constantly, as if it might have some answers about his life, though he didn’t feel reassured. The effect of Ms. Davey’s show is similarly ambivalent — is it about life or death? — though its meditative mood makes it an ideal exit point for a Chelsea tour.

-Holland Cotter