Moyra Davey

My preference for looking at photographs is always within books: recent passions are for the modest artist-books of Justine Kurland and Shala Miller, and a posthumous publication of Alix Cléo Roubaud. Viewing these works, and the ways the artists use their bodies and their words, inevitably led to Francesca Woodman, and her talismanic monograph of 1986.

Woodman played with light and form and flirted with literary and surrealist themes. Roubaud’s thought and practice are more abstracted and in a philosophical vein, but there are some uncanny parallels between the two artists. Both young women were working in the same era – the late 70s and early 80s, framing their own bodies and using seriality, repetition, and long exposures to blur motion. Both were singularly attuned to natural light; both were invested in formal experiments and a crafting of the print. They favored similar, baroque interiors and sartorial flourishes, and performed for the camera enactments of seduction and desire. Sadly, they shared an intensity in their affective lives as well, cut short by suicide and suicidal behavior both.

I see the gestures of their photographs, especially the unabashed pleasures and provocations of the body and its fetishistic details, manifesting in Kurland and Miller, though the latter two have queered the scenario, and position women as primary viewers of the work. I feel a certain awe when I look at what my two younger contemporaries have achieved, specifically an approach towards the female body free of the inhibitions that burdened artists of my generation.

All four artists are also poets, wordsmiths – keepers of diaries, writers of letters, essays and plays. Shala Miller’s Tender Noted brings together a multitude of these genres.

Carla Williams came to my attention via her 2023 book Tender. In the mid to late 80s she was staging self-portrait photographs with many antecedents, but in particular she cites the unlikely triad of Cindy Sherman, Mike and Doug Starn, and Anne Noggle. Shot in beautiful light, using her own body, Williams’s photographs contain all the fascination a view camera can deliver; with a passing nod to Pictures Generation concepts, she made her work knowingly, and for a tiny audience. She was not interested in the art world.

I staged reenactments of the photographs of each of the five artists. These efforts have been typically dutiful; inevitably, I only succeeded when I was able, mostly by accident, to leave behind their images, decrepitude be damned.*

—Moyra Davey

*(see Anne Noggle’s iconic book, The Saga of the Fallen Flesh).