Photographer
Moyra Davey
Moyra Davey (b. 1958, Canada) is a Canadian artist, photographer, and writer known for her deeply personal and literary approach to image-making. Her work often combines photography, text, and film, exploring themes of time, memory, and everyday life.
Davey’s photographs frequently depict domestic interiors, books, and personal objects, emphasizing repetition, fragmentation, and the passage of time. She is also known for mailing her photographic prints as folded letters, incorporating the traces of circulation into the work itself.
Her photobooks and artist books are highly regarded for their intimate scale and conceptual coherence. For collectors, Davey’s work is valued for its intellectual depth, cross-disciplinary practice, and its significant role in contemporary art and photobook culture.
Selected Works & Key Projects
A source-backed introduction to individual photographs and significant bodies of work.
Key projects
Project · 1990–2017
Copperheads
Copperheads is Davey’s long-running project of close photographs of worn pennies, first developed in 1990 as a grid of one hundred images and later reactivated through mailed-print installations. Macro views enlarge Lincoln’s profile, corrosion, dirt, and scratches, making a low-denomination coin look alternately like a portrait, a damaged national emblem, or abstract terrain. Later versions fold, tape, stamp, address, and post the prints, so photographic objects acquire further creases and marks through circulation. Museum and exhibition accounts have connected the project’s currency imagery to the early-1990s recession and art-market collapse. It merits selection as the project that most clearly joins Davey’s attention to humble objects with photography’s own status as an exchanged, handled object.
View source ↗
Project · 2011
The Coffee Shop, The Library
Made for MoMA’s New Photography 2011, The Coffee Shop, The Library is an installation of chromogenic prints drawn from MoMA’s library and archives, New York public libraries, Paris cafés, and Davey’s own bookshelves. The project treats the coffee shop and library as public settings that can sustain private reading, reverie, and work. Davey folded the prints into envelope forms, mailed them, then displayed the returned images with their creases, tape, addresses, and postage intact. That method makes circulation part of the picture rather than a step outside it. Its presentation in MoMA’s New Photography survey documented Davey’s contribution to an expanded photographic practice in which image, writing, mail, and installation are inseparable.
View source ↗Project · 2011
Les Goddesses
Les Goddesses is a 61-minute HD video in which Davey interweaves feminist literary history with autobiography. Drawing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont alongside recollections of her sisters, the work moves through voice-over, staged or revisited early portraits, books, domestic interiors, and footage of the artist listening to and repeating a recording. Its deliberately hesitant narration makes research, memory, correction, and self-presentation visible as processes rather than fixed testimony. Shown at greengrassi in 2011 and included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, the film became a key early example of Davey’s essayistic moving-image practice. It merits selection because it shifts her attention from still-life objects toward family, historical women, and the unstable work of telling a life.
View source ↗Selected photographs
1990
Copperhead #40
Copperhead #40 is an enlarged chromogenic close-up of a worn U.S. penny, photographed in 1990 and printed later. Davey uses macro photography to make the coin’s scratches, grime, relief, and oxidized color read almost as an abstract terrain, while Abraham Lincoln’s familiar profile becomes unstable or difficult to locate. The photograph belongs to Copperheads, a 100-image investigation of low-value currency, circulation, and touch. Selected individually, #40 preserves the series’ key achievement: making an ordinary object register simultaneously as a national symbol, a used thing, and a materially marked photograph.
Work source ↗1990
Copperhead #32
Copperhead #32 enlarges the distressed surface of a penny until its grooves, dents, and irregular relief take precedence over the coin’s legibility. Made from Davey’s 1990 macro photographs of circulated pennies and printed in 2010–2011, it is one specimen within Copperheads rather than an isolated image with a separate subject. The series has been recognized for contrasting the penny’s modest economic status with Lincoln’s official portrait and for treating wear as evidence of anonymous contact. This example merits selection because its near-abstraction demonstrates how Davey makes photographic detail carry questions of value, use, and representation.
Work source ↗1990
Copperhead No. 44
Copperhead No. 44 is a large chromogenic print from Davey’s 1990 Copperheads series. Its tightly framed, weathered penny transforms a familiar unit of currency into a field of corroded color, abrasions, and enlarged relief; Lincoln’s profile is present but vulnerable to disappearance. Across the 100 related images, Davey connected photography’s capacity for close inspection to the physical history of an object passed hand to hand. The work was included in Harvard’s 2008 survey of her photographs, which brought renewed institutional attention to this early body of work. #44 is selected as a concentrated example of Davey’s sustained attention to overlooked domestic and civic materials.
Work source ↗
2007
Bloom
Bloom is a group of nineteen small or smaller chromogenic prints arranged as an irregular wall-mounted constellation. Rather than offering one decisive subject, Davey brings together interiors, books, reproduced images, objects, and fragments of other photographs, letting scale, adjacency, and empty wall space produce associations. The work extends her photographic practice from the single image toward an essay-like sequence in which looking is shaped by collecting and arranging. The Metropolitan Museum of Art presented Bloom in its 2008 exhibition Photography on Photography, situating it within a medium-conscious history of contemporary photographic work. It merits selection for showing how Davey turns private visual notes into a deliberately open montage.
Work source ↗1999
Long Life Cool White
Long Life Cool White photographs Davey’s workroom through the glare and soft blur of fluorescent bulbs in the foreground. Their printed manufacturer’s phrase supplies the title, while books, files, a city map, desk, and camera recede behind them. The image makes a modest interior into a study of photographic conditions: illumination, the apparatus of work, and the time spent reading, filing, and looking. It became the cover image and title work for the Harvard Art Museums’ 2008 exhibition and accompanying Yale University Press publication, giving it a documented role in the public framing of Davey’s photography. It merits selection as a precise statement of her diaristic, materially attentive approach.
Work source ↗-
1982
Education
Concordia University
Davey’s biography lists Concordia University, Montreal, in 1982.
Source: greengrassi Verified Sep 3, 2026
-
1988
Education
University of California, San Diego
Davey’s biography lists the University of California, San Diego, in 1988.
Source: greengrassi Verified Sep 3, 2026
-
1989
Education
Whitney Independent Study Program
Davey’s biography lists the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York in 1989.
Source: greengrassi Verified Sep 3, 2026
-
2008
Exhibition
Long Life Cool White
Her biography lists Long Life Cool White at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Source: greengrassi Verified Sep 3, 2026
-
September 28, 2011–January 16, 2012
Exhibition
New Photography 2011
Davey participated in MoMA’s New Photography 2011 exhibition.
Source: Museum of Modern Art Verified Sep 3, 2026
-
2018
Award
Scotiabank Photography Award
Davey’s biography lists the Scotiabank Photography Award for 2018.
Source: greengrassi Verified Sep 3, 2026
-
October 1, 2020–January 3, 2021
Exhibition
Moyra Davey: The Faithful
The National Gallery of Canada presented The Faithful in Ottawa during these dates.
Source: National Gallery of Canada Verified Sep 3, 2026
-
2022
Award
Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts
Davey’s biography lists the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, Canada, for 2022.
Source: greengrassi Verified Sep 3, 2026
Representation
greengrassi
greengrassi maintains an artist page for Davey and lists her exhibitions at the gallery.
Verified 2026-09-03greengrassi
Collection
Museum of Modern Art
MoMA’s artist record lists 13 works by Davey online in its collection database.
Verified 2026-09-03Museum of Modern Art
Collection
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney artist record lists seven works by Davey and states that the museum first acquired her work in 2012.
Verified 2026-09-03Whitney Museum of American Art
Collection
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art records Copperhead #40 as purchased by the museum in 2012.
Verified 2026-09-03National Gallery of Art
Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Met’s collection record identifies Bloom, dated 2007, as a work by Davey.
Verified 2026-09-03The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Collection
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
SFMOMA’s collection record identifies Copperhead No. 44 as a Davey work acquired by the museum in 2010.
Verified 2026-09-03San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Moyra Davey: The Faithful (opens a new site)
Concordia University’s exhibition guide surveys Davey’s long-term engagement with photography, language, still and moving images, and identifies works included in The Faithful.
Moyra Davey. The Coffee Shop, The Library. 2011 (opens a new site)
MoMA’s artist audio commentary discusses the work’s source photographs, folding and taping process, and its relationship to libraries and cafés.
Moyra Davey: Burn the Diaries (opens a new site)
Art21 magazine article by Risa Puleo addressing Davey’s Burn the Diaries exhibition and her use of writing, video, memory, and Jean Genet as points of inquiry.
Four [чотири] (opens a new site)
greengrassi’s exhibition record identifies Four [чотири] as a 2025 HD video with sound, running 32 minutes and 47 seconds.
Moyra Davey (Les Goddesses) (opens a new site)
Whitney video in which Davey discusses Les Goddesses and its connections between autobiographical material and feminist literary history.
Mark Ruwedel
Shared publisher: MACK, Presentation House Gallery
9 photobook(s) in the library
Nick Waplington
Shared publisher: MACK
18 photobook(s) in the library
Daido Moriyama
Shared publisher: MACK
15 photobook(s) in the library
Stephen Shore
Shared publisher: MACK
14 photobook(s) in the library
COMMUNITY DISCUSSION
Discuss this entry
Share interpretations, reading notes, and source-aware questions. For catalog corrections, use the feedback form below.
No discussion yet. Start the first focused conversation.
Sign in to join the discussion.
Optionally receive a digest when related photobooks are added to the catalog.
See something incorrect? Sign in to suggest a correction or report an issue.