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.
Behind these pink tulips stands the whole lineage of Dutch flower painting: abundance banked against a black ground, petals given the drama of chiaroscuro, beauty framed as both wealth and warning. Yet the old masters always supplied a vase, a ledge, a table edge for the eye to rest on. Here there is none. The bouquet hovers in a rough attic of boards and rafters, above a long fall of dark velvet, and the arrangement becomes an apparition.
I confess the velvet troubles me more than the flowers. It hangs the way a dress hangs; the tulips mass exactly where a face should be; and suddenly I am not looking at a still life but at a figure, headless or flower-headed, standing patiently in the dark. Then the detail that undoes my composure: one tulip has slipped from the mass and dangles upside down on its green stem, pale pink, showing the greenish star at its base. That single fallen head restores time to the picture. Every bouquet, I remember, is a clock.
Cig Harvey made this photograph in Rockport, Maine, where she has long practiced a domestic kind of enchantment, published in books such as Blue Violet and held in American museum collections. The archival pigment print sustains the illusion: blacks deep enough to swallow the barn, pinks that keep their flush of flesh. I return to the hanging tulip each time, and each time it has not yet fallen. Photography’s small mercy: the clock is stopped, the petals stay.
Behind these pink tulips stands the whole lineage of Dutch flower painting: abundance banked against a black ground, petals given the drama of chiaroscuro, beauty framed as both wealth and warning. Yet the old masters always supplied a vase, a ledge, a table edge for the eye to rest on. Here there is none. The bouquet hovers in a rough attic of boards and rafters, above a long fall of dark velvet, and the arrangement becomes an apparition.
I confess the velvet troubles me more than the flowers. It hangs the way a dress hangs; the tulips mass exactly where a face should be; and suddenly I am not looking at a still life but at a figure, headless or flower-headed, standing patiently in the dark. Then the detail that undoes my composure: one tulip has slipped from the mass and dangles upside down on its green stem, pale pink, showing the greenish star at its base. That single fallen head restores time to the picture. Every bouquet, I remember, is a clock.
Cig Harvey made this photograph in Rockport, Maine, where she has long practiced a domestic kind of enchantment, published in books such as Blue Violet and held in American museum collections. The archival pigment print sustains the illusion: blacks deep enough to swallow the barn, pinks that keep their flush of flesh. I return to the hanging tulip each time, and each time it has not yet fallen. Photography’s small mercy: the clock is stopped, the petals stay.