(Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art)
Sontag pointed out photography as inherently elegiac, and Davey further expresses its moribund nature-morte with a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. Like instagram filters made to affect 70’s grain on crystalline microlenses - implanting an artificial comfort into the cold of its technologic clarity - Davey went from photographing the dust and stains that mark human touch and embody nostalgia, to pre-placing that touch on the photographs, mailing them to package the touch that preceded them. Unlike Beshty’s copper marring conceptual emblems, the touch placed onto photographs re-re-re-inscribes photography’s loss of the human in favor of the sediment of it. Like Long Life Cool Whites, brimming with the ghosts photography’s past theorists, the book was pre-yellowed with the past brought to the present to fill it like Proustian remembrance of theorists past. It’s all incredibly affective, like Sontag’s furthering Genet’s “the only criterion of an act is its elegance” with Wilde's: “the vital element is not sincerity, but style.”
