# Moyra Davey As Hollier notes, "The index card file [...] is also the best support for the _opera aperta_, whose desire was pervasive in the 1950s and 1960s" [@hollier_notes_2005, 40], and I would like to argue in recent years have expanded possibilities within various medium from the still-lingering legacies of British structural film to the emancipatory possibilities of personal filmmaking. George Baker는 Moyra Davey의 사진과 영상 작업들을 통해 그녀의 작업이 하나의 immediately present in her each work as the central point of death and abandonment, but through the "logic of the series, [...] a medium logic, a rethinking of the photograph itself. [@baker_lateness_2023, 325]. In her work, Moyra Davey's *Copperheads* (1990-) invites us to align photography to open the transformation of the medium logic of the series: "it is basic, almost primordial, for the Copperheads comprise an archive of silhouettes, a typology of portraits, pointing back to several origins of the photographic impulse itself, and to a specific ur-form of the medium" [@baker_lateness_2023, 326]. ![[Moyra Davey, Copperheads (1990-).png]] 그녀의 logic of the series in dometic documentation of her daily life and dust that piled up on the places and objects은 그녀의 삶 속에서 이미지들을 읽어낸다. 과거가 얽히고 욕망이 얽히며 결코 손에 쥘 수 없는 desire 들이 사진 위로 떠오른다. 그녀에게 있어서 이미지 위로 포착된 욕망들은 A “sadness without an object,” to use Susan Stewart’s phrase, nostalgia articulates not the loss of a love object, as in the classic accounts of melancholia, but a libidinal tie with time itself, the loss of an epoch as much as the space-time of origin or of beginnings.” (Baker, 2023, p. 13) > “All these things—buttons, pennies, dust, with their scatological associations that lead us to the body—are clearly memento mori. It’s a known paradox that the camera loves to enact its transformation on the abject—like Irving Penn’s cigarette butts—but I don’t think that’s why I gravitate to these subjects. I’m interested in what close looking reveals about the world. I’ve been doing this macro-looking for a long time: at toes and women’s faces on 19th-century tintypes in the 1980s; at money in the 1990s; at names and titles on record spines, the dregs in coffee cups, and Métro tickets with handwritten notes to the dead more recently. My approach to the photograph is essentially Barthesian, in that it’s about mortality.” ^[“Accidents among the Slow Things: Adam Szymczyk Interviews Moyra Davey,” in Moyra Davey: Speaker Receiver, ed. Adam Szymczyk (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel; New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), p. 142-44]] Fifty Minutes에서 그녀는 "seriesness"를 모노로그를 통한 inflecting을 통해 더욱더 확장된다 by literally repeating them, recording them on and in video. > Fifty Minutes, 2006: “In critical circles, nostalgia has a negative, even decadent connotation. But the etymology of the word uncovers other meanings. It comes from the Greek nostos, a return home, and algos, pain. According to Jane Gallop, after ‘homesickness’ and ‘melancholy regret,’ in the dictionary there is a third definition of nostalgia, which is ‘unsatisfied desire.’ And that is what the word has always implied to me: unconsummated desire kept alive by private forays into the cultural spaces of memory.” ^[Moyra Davey, “Fifty Minutes (video transcript),” in Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 128.] Through these works, the images she presents propose that, in the context of existence and subjectivity, we are not only recipients but also analogous to the photograph itself. Subjectivity, in this framework, operates as a dual entity: it is both the object of desire and the desiring subject, simultaneously absorbing and projecting. Or, as Susan Stewart puts this thought, the “point of desire which the nostalgic seeks is in fact the absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire.” She concludes: “Nostalgia is the desire for desire.” [@stewart_longing_1993, 23] After the video was produced, in 2006, Davey turned increasingly to moving-image works and to writing, and to new photographic formats like her folded and thus internally fragmented “aerograms,” photographs sent like letters through the mail, covered in tape, stamps, postmarks, and writing. Domestic photographs would still appear, indeed sometimes in great quantity, but the video announced a turn in the artist’s work that is beyond the immediate purview of this chapter. It is the author’s hope that the foundation for reading Davey’s project laid out here can serve as a platform for extending this reading into the later projects, and to works like My Necropolis, 2009, or Les Goddesses, 2011, and the works and forms that have followed. ## Related Concepts ```dataview LIST FROM [[Moyra Davey]] and "References/Concepts" and -"Plans" and -"resources" ``` ## Bibliography/References ```dataview LIST WITHOUT ID "_" + "[" + Title + "]" + "(" + file.name + ")" + "_" + " (" + year + ")" FROM [[Moyra Davey]] and "References/Readings" and -"Plans" and -"resources" SORT year ```