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.
In a working flower market the tarp is a tool, not a picture: it keeps the sun off the stock so the blooms hold their color for the day’s buyers. Here, in Mexico, the sun has other ideas. Striking the far side of the orange sheet, it turns the whole screen incandescent and prints on it the shadows of the very plants it was hung to protect.
The organization is as plain as it is complete. Horizontal seams, tacked with knots of thread, rule the glowing field like lines on a ledger. A brighter slit runs down the left edge where two sheets fail to meet, admitting one clean stripe of day. Along the bottom, the gray tops of concrete posts hold the arrangement to the ordinary ground. Everything else is shadow-play: leaves pressed against the weave stay sharp as stencils, while branches a foot farther back blur into smoke. The tarp behaves like photographic paper mid-exposure, and the camera’s only job, done exactly, is to keep still and accept the result.
Harvey usually works close to home on the Maine coast, where her color pictures of gardens, fog and family have filled three books, The Blue Notebook, You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet, and earned a steady place in American museum collections. Traveling, she found the same subject waiting: color as an event, not a decoration. The archival pigment print keeps the orange saturated to the corners and the shadows soft-edged, a modest piece of luck observed by someone who knew exactly what it was worth.
In a working flower market the tarp is a tool, not a picture: it keeps the sun off the stock so the blooms hold their color for the day’s buyers. Here, in Mexico, the sun has other ideas. Striking the far side of the orange sheet, it turns the whole screen incandescent and prints on it the shadows of the very plants it was hung to protect.
The organization is as plain as it is complete. Horizontal seams, tacked with knots of thread, rule the glowing field like lines on a ledger. A brighter slit runs down the left edge where two sheets fail to meet, admitting one clean stripe of day. Along the bottom, the gray tops of concrete posts hold the arrangement to the ordinary ground. Everything else is shadow-play: leaves pressed against the weave stay sharp as stencils, while branches a foot farther back blur into smoke. The tarp behaves like photographic paper mid-exposure, and the camera’s only job, done exactly, is to keep still and accept the result.
Harvey usually works close to home on the Maine coast, where her color pictures of gardens, fog and family have filled three books, The Blue Notebook, You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet, and earned a steady place in American museum collections. Traveling, she found the same subject waiting: color as an event, not a decoration. The archival pigment print keeps the orange saturated to the corners and the shadows soft-edged, a modest piece of luck observed by someone who knew exactly what it was worth.