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.
Photographers have been working the far side of wet glass at least since Josef Sudek trained his camera on the fogged window of his Prague studio; the tradition prizes what a pane withholds as much as what it grants. Here the pane belongs to a greenhouse in Camden, Maine, its white muntins flaking, its glass sweating with a green interior climate. Through that veil a bare arm rises and holds a single poppy upright, as if presenting it for inspection to the weather outside.
The picture’s discipline lies in its color. Nearly everything is green: the ivy overtaking the left edge, the plants pressing their leaves flat against the glass from inside, the tendrils creeping along the weathered sill. Against this saturated field the poppy burns as the lone warm note, its petals diffused by condensation into a soft coral flare. The hand is softened too, knuckles just legible through runnels of moisture, so that flesh and flower seem to float in suspension, specimens in a botanist’s jar. The drips descending the pane keep time; they insist the picture was made in one humid minute, not composed at leisure.
Harvey has built a domestic lyric in color from coastal Maine, in books that read like weather diaries: The Blue Notebook, You an Orchestra a Bomb, Blue Violet. Widely collected and shown in American museums, she prints in archival pigment, a process that holds the drenched greens and that single ember of orange without coarsening either. What survives the glass is her subject, tenderness delivered through obstruction, legible and out of reach at once.
Photographers have been working the far side of wet glass at least since Josef Sudek trained his camera on the fogged window of his Prague studio; the tradition prizes what a pane withholds as much as what it grants. Here the pane belongs to a greenhouse in Camden, Maine, its white muntins flaking, its glass sweating with a green interior climate. Through that veil a bare arm rises and holds a single poppy upright, as if presenting it for inspection to the weather outside.
The picture’s discipline lies in its color. Nearly everything is green: the ivy overtaking the left edge, the plants pressing their leaves flat against the glass from inside, the tendrils creeping along the weathered sill. Against this saturated field the poppy burns as the lone warm note, its petals diffused by condensation into a soft coral flare. The hand is softened too, knuckles just legible through runnels of moisture, so that flesh and flower seem to float in suspension, specimens in a botanist’s jar. The drips descending the pane keep time; they insist the picture was made in one humid minute, not composed at leisure.
Harvey has built a domestic lyric in color from coastal Maine, in books that read like weather diaries: The Blue Notebook, You an Orchestra a Bomb, Blue Violet. Widely collected and shown in American museums, she prints in archival pigment, a process that holds the drenched greens and that single ember of orange without coarsening either. What survives the glass is her subject, tenderness delivered through obstruction, legible and out of reach at once.