Moyra Davey's Copperheads at the Fogg

The contemporary photographer Moyra Davey has an exhibit at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum. Davey's subject is literally the dustbin of history. Phonograph needles, stereo receivers, stereo records, book-shelves, liquor bottles, pennies: these items bear the weight of material history for Davey. She goes so far as to photograph someone (herself?) holding two books and blowing-off their dust.

I can't say most of it did much for me. Some of the photos, like one detailing a crammed together collection of items on a shelf with a poster for Jacques Tati's Playtime and a (Mondrian-like) window frame with many vertical and horizontal lines behind it, are witty. But, more often than not, the photos start and end with physicality and prompt little speculation. The numerous re-workings of liquor bottles on tabletops in particular seem inert, even, ironically, banal given the attempt to bestow metaphysical/metaphorical import to the everydayness of these objects through repetition.

But then we have those pennies, and a world of speculation on materiality, decay, history, and the figure of Lincoln opens up. A Harvard publication summarizes this part of the exhibit:

The entryway to the gallery features 100 of Davey's Copperheads (late 1980s–early 1990s), in a 10 x 10 grid form under Plexiglas. This series, taken with a macro lens, depicts extreme close-ups of President Lincoln's profile on various pennies. Each image shows a different penny whose surface has been nicked, scarred, gouged, and tarnished, or a combination of all mutilations that make it sometimes impossible to discern the profile.

We can start with the title for the exhibition – Copperheads. Copperheads were Northern Unionists who despised Abolitionists and blacks, opposed the Civil War, and regarded Lincoln as a despot destroying republican values. Copperhead newspapers were known to make vicious and scurrilous attacks on Lincoln. Copperheads are also a venomous pitviper species of snake found in North America. These are figures of attack and disfigurement. Thinking along these lines, out of the 100 pennies on display, perhaps the most startling penny for me -- and once my eyes found this particular penny, I was given a definite jolt -- was one which had a deep indentation at Lincoln's temple. This is where Davey's macro-photography work does wonders: the detail offered in the photos renders these objects available for a degree of detailed scrutiny not available to the naked eye; the pennies assume the status of miniature sculptures in these photographs. When the pennies are granted this amount of scale and detail, the indentation is palpably felt as a reminder of Lincoln's assassination in a way simply not accessible to someone who has just picked-up a penny for observation. The bas-relief of Lincoln by Victor David Brenner-- the depth and alteration throug decay of which is, again, bolstered by the photography -- was based on a Matthew Brady studio portrait of Lincoln. After I left the exhibition my brain somehow latched onto how these pennies were related to Brady's Civil War photographs. Specifically, how the "primitive" photographic apparatus used by Brady to produce his immortal images of Civil War soldiers called attention to the materiality of the image. These photos were literally "rough around the edges." (Some of Brady's, and his company of photographers, photos may be found here.

One last note. Both Davey and the introduction to the exhibit call attention to the psychoanalytical life around money. In an interview, Davey maintains that the dust and dirt revealed through the macro-photographs of the pennies "are a perfect encapsulation of the scatological nature of money." I'm tempted to say this is bullshit. First, dust and dirt are not scatological. Second, the photographs don't really detail dust and dirt – they detail decay. While there is something to notion of decay being related to anality and the scatological, in this instance the relationship doesn't seem to be exhibited by the pennies. If anything, it seems to me that the Lincoln pennies' more obvious psychoanalytical categories would be loss, melancholy, and mourning – categories which rhyme with the larger concerns purportedly addressed in Davey's other works on display in the exhibit.