Harvard Art Museums / Publications

Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey

Moyra Davey; with an introduction by Helen Molesworth
ISBN 978-0-300-13646-3

softcover; 152 pages; 69 color illus.; 5-1/2x8 in
$24.95 ($22.46 for Members)

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Photographer Moyra Davey takes quiet but ravishing photographs of typically overlooked and banal objects. Newspapers, dust, books, money, empty bottles, and the things on top of refrigerators all figure in series of pictures that bring viewers into a state of increased sensitivity to their everyday lives. Long Life Cool White features 45 of the artist’s photographs from the past two decades.

Davey's relationship to such traditions as street and conceptual photography and French surrealism can be seen throughout these pages. Noted scholar Helen Molesworth examines the domestic content of Davey’s work as well as Davey's burgeoning career as a writer. The book also includes Davey’s insightful essay "Notes on Photography and Accident," in which she discusses the themes of chance, death, and the poetic that occur in the writings of three major theorists of photography: Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Susan Sontag.

The book accompanied an exhibition at the Harvard Art Museum, February 28–June 30, 2008.

Moyra Davey is a New York-based photographer and writer. Helen Molesworth is the Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museum.