The Copperheads are a series of 100 photographs of pennies shot between 1989 and 1990.  Moyra Davey writes: "When I began collecting pennies for the Copperhead series, I'd just moved to NY, had no money and was thinking a lot about the psychology of money: Freudian ideas that equate money with excrement; the Potlatch custom of shaming a rival with extravagant gifts and squandering of goods (the title of the series comes from the Kwakiuti & Haida ritual of tossing "armloads of coppers into the sea"); and misers... "I was also fascinated by the story of Emanuel Ninger, a 19th century counterfeiter who lived in a farm house in New Jersey and quietly drew in pen and ink one fifty or hundred dollar bill a week.  He would then travel to Manhattan and cash in his small artworks at different liquor stores.  His bills soon became sought after and collected, but he remained an anonymous sensation until the sad day he was apprehended, paying for a drink by placing a bill on a wet bar top.  The inks ran, ending a fourteen-year career and sending a talented man, by then a cause celebre, to jail. "I shot the pennies on a copy-stand with a raking light; I would take the film to the lab in Chinatown that made small, white bordered prints.  Though I was not making much revenue from them, I thought of the Copperheads in some way as my own counterfeit, a deeply satisfying reverie of self-sufficiency, a bit like the shit-to-gold fantasy whereupon the dirtier and grimier the penny, the greater its potential for transformation and surprise" (2010).