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.
The subject is not the branches but the light doing something a sky should not be able to do: on the right it flushes a deep arterial red, on the left it hangs in a green curtain, and between the two the aurora seems to be making up its mind. Stars prick the black at the upper left. A hedge of bare winter branches, leafless and nervous, reaches up from the bottom as if to measure the color. This is weather, technically, though it behaves more like an event.
Red auroras are rare, and they unnerve people; for centuries they were read as blood in the sky, an omen, a warning of something. Harvey, in Iceland, simply stood under one and let it happen to her camera. There is no trick here, or only that of being in the right cold place at the right hour. I find the picture faintly comic and wholly sublime at the same time, the branches scribbling their small dark protest against a firmament that has, briefly, lost its composure.
Harvey, British-born and based on the coast of Maine, more often works close to home, among gardens and family; this Icelandic sky is the same sensibility carried north and turned up past reason, kin to the wonder in books like Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb. The archival pigment print is what makes it hold: the reds stay saturated without clotting, the green keeps its cool edge, and the stars survive as clean points in the black. Some skies you have to be shown to believe, and this is one of them.
The subject is not the branches but the light doing something a sky should not be able to do: on the right it flushes a deep arterial red, on the left it hangs in a green curtain, and between the two the aurora seems to be making up its mind. Stars prick the black at the upper left. A hedge of bare winter branches, leafless and nervous, reaches up from the bottom as if to measure the color. This is weather, technically, though it behaves more like an event.
Red auroras are rare, and they unnerve people; for centuries they were read as blood in the sky, an omen, a warning of something. Harvey, in Iceland, simply stood under one and let it happen to her camera. There is no trick here, or only that of being in the right cold place at the right hour. I find the picture faintly comic and wholly sublime at the same time, the branches scribbling their small dark protest against a firmament that has, briefly, lost its composure.
Harvey, British-born and based on the coast of Maine, more often works close to home, among gardens and family; this Icelandic sky is the same sensibility carried north and turned up past reason, kin to the wonder in books like Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb. The archival pigment print is what makes it hold: the reds stay saturated without clotting, the green keeps its cool edge, and the stars survive as clean points in the black. Some skies you have to be shown to believe, and this is one of them.