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 moment ago she was standing among them; now she has gathered the whole armful of white clematis and is folding into it, and in a moment more she will have vanished behind the blooms entirely. The picture stops her mid-disappearance. Her face is already half gone, lowered into the flowers, blurred by the dusk and by the reluctance of the light to fully describe her. Only the clematis is in focus, if focus is even the word for something that seems to be generating its own pale glow.
There is a particular hour, just after the sun has quit but before the dark takes over, when white flowers turn faintly radioactive, and Harvey has waited for it. The bouquet floats like a cluster of small stars pulled down into a Maine field; the woman clutching it, ring on one finger, is nearly a shadow by comparison. You could call it romantic, and it is, but it also has the slight menace of anything that glows in the dark. I keep expecting the flowers to hum.
Harvey, British by birth and long settled on this coast, works in a register of heightened sensation that has filled books like You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and entered American museum collections. Printed as an archival pigment print, the image holds that difficult twilight blue without muddying it, and lets the whites of the petals keep their luminous edge against the near-black field. It is the rare photograph of a person that becomes, quietly, a photograph of light choosing what to keep.
A moment ago she was standing among them; now she has gathered the whole armful of white clematis and is folding into it, and in a moment more she will have vanished behind the blooms entirely. The picture stops her mid-disappearance. Her face is already half gone, lowered into the flowers, blurred by the dusk and by the reluctance of the light to fully describe her. Only the clematis is in focus, if focus is even the word for something that seems to be generating its own pale glow.
There is a particular hour, just after the sun has quit but before the dark takes over, when white flowers turn faintly radioactive, and Harvey has waited for it. The bouquet floats like a cluster of small stars pulled down into a Maine field; the woman clutching it, ring on one finger, is nearly a shadow by comparison. You could call it romantic, and it is, but it also has the slight menace of anything that glows in the dark. I keep expecting the flowers to hum.
Harvey, British by birth and long settled on this coast, works in a register of heightened sensation that has filled books like You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and entered American museum collections. Printed as an archival pigment print, the image holds that difficult twilight blue without muddying it, and lets the whites of the petals keep their luminous edge against the near-black field. It is the rare photograph of a person that becomes, quietly, a photograph of light choosing what to keep.