Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph.
A small amber lamp rides the roof of the black truck, and across its lens runs a hairline crack. I confess I saw it late. The woman had all my attention: the rose-pink coat, the dark hair coming loose, the pipe held up in one pale hand, the smoke unrolling against the glass like a thought made briefly visible. Yet it is the cracked lamp I keep returning to, the flaw that lets time into the picture.
Everything else is composed, almost courtly. The window glass holds reflections of bare trees, so that she travels through a winter that may only be a reflection. The pipe is a borrowed sign, an heirloom from some grandfather’s mouth, and she wears it without irony; the codes of costume slip, deliciously. I cannot decide whether she is leaving or merely sitting, whether the smoke is patience or refusal. The glass keeps me out. Photography is often like this: a nearness one cannot enter. Behind it, she looks ahead at something the frame declines to give me, and I envy the windshield.
Harvey works in Rockport, Maine, where her books, The Blue Notebook, Blue Violet, have made the domestic day a theatre of sensation; American museums exhibit and collect her, which reassures me without explaining her. The archival pigment print is the right vehicle for this scene: it keeps the truck’s black dense as felt and lets the pink glow like something warm-blooded in all that dark. And the little lamp keeps its crack, the picture keeps its secret, and I keep looking.
A small amber lamp rides the roof of the black truck, and across its lens runs a hairline crack. I confess I saw it late. The woman had all my attention: the rose-pink coat, the dark hair coming loose, the pipe held up in one pale hand, the smoke unrolling against the glass like a thought made briefly visible. Yet it is the cracked lamp I keep returning to, the flaw that lets time into the picture.
Everything else is composed, almost courtly. The window glass holds reflections of bare trees, so that she travels through a winter that may only be a reflection. The pipe is a borrowed sign, an heirloom from some grandfather’s mouth, and she wears it without irony; the codes of costume slip, deliciously. I cannot decide whether she is leaving or merely sitting, whether the smoke is patience or refusal. The glass keeps me out. Photography is often like this: a nearness one cannot enter. Behind it, she looks ahead at something the frame declines to give me, and I envy the windshield.
Harvey works in Rockport, Maine, where her books, The Blue Notebook, Blue Violet, have made the domestic day a theatre of sensation; American museums exhibit and collect her, which reassures me without explaining her. The archival pigment print is the right vehicle for this scene: it keeps the truck’s black dense as felt and lets the pink glow like something warm-blooded in all that dark. And the little lamp keeps its crack, the picture keeps its secret, and I keep looking.