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.
On the pale koi to the lower right, a faint blush of gold runs along the spine, and higher up a red-and-white fish wears its markings like a seal pressed onto damp paper. Small things, but they reorganize the picture. Once you notice the marks you begin to read the five bodies as a kind of script, five characters drifting across a black page of water, each one lettered differently, each turning at its own unhurried angle through the dark.
The koi is a Japanese emblem of endurance and good fortune, bred over centuries into these particular reds and yellows and ghost-whites. Yet the water here refuses to flatter them. It is nearly black, giving no bottom and no surface, so the fish seem to hover in an element that is mostly absence. To look is to be granted only what the darkness releases: a yellow flank here, an orange tail there, the white one surfacing like something remembered. The rest stays submerged, and we are asked to accept not seeing it.
Cig Harvey found the picture in Japan, though its stillness feels closer to a prayer than a postcard. The Rockport, Maine photographer, whose books include Blue Violet and The Blue Notebook, has always trusted color to carry meaning too large for words. As an archival pigment print, the image holds those saturated bodies against a near-lightless field without the shadows collapsing into flat black, so each fish keeps its own weather. Widely collected by American museums, she offers five ordinary carp and lets them become, briefly, a slow sentence about patience and chance.
On the pale koi to the lower right, a faint blush of gold runs along the spine, and higher up a red-and-white fish wears its markings like a seal pressed onto damp paper. Small things, but they reorganize the picture. Once you notice the marks you begin to read the five bodies as a kind of script, five characters drifting across a black page of water, each one lettered differently, each turning at its own unhurried angle through the dark.
The koi is a Japanese emblem of endurance and good fortune, bred over centuries into these particular reds and yellows and ghost-whites. Yet the water here refuses to flatter them. It is nearly black, giving no bottom and no surface, so the fish seem to hover in an element that is mostly absence. To look is to be granted only what the darkness releases: a yellow flank here, an orange tail there, the white one surfacing like something remembered. The rest stays submerged, and we are asked to accept not seeing it.
Cig Harvey found the picture in Japan, though its stillness feels closer to a prayer than a postcard. The Rockport, Maine photographer, whose books include Blue Violet and The Blue Notebook, has always trusted color to carry meaning too large for words. As an archival pigment print, the image holds those saturated bodies against a near-lightless field without the shadows collapsing into flat black, so each fish keeps its own weather. Widely collected by American museums, she offers five ordinary carp and lets them become, briefly, a slow sentence about patience and chance.