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.
Look into the throats and you find them: small points of light lodged at the center of flower after flower, a bead of dew or a glint of pollen catching what little brightness reaches this deep into the bed. They are tiny, easy to miss, and they change everything. Without them the picture would be a wall of near-black petunias, indigo bleeding into violet bleeding into a purple so dark it forgets it is a color; with them, the field turns to a night sky, each bloom a small dark constellation.
What Harvey has done is take the most common flower of the summer window box, the petunia any gardener buys by the flat, and photograph it as though it were rare and grave. The blooms crowd edge to edge, their trumpet mouths open, their petals veined with fine silver lines that catch the light like frost on velvet. Here and there a rim flares magenta, a reminder of the daylight version of this plant, before the dark reclaims it. It is a study in how close beauty and mourning can sit.
Harvey, who gardens and works on the coast of Maine and is widely collected by American museums, has built books such as Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb around exactly this: the domestic made strange, the sensory pushed until it aches. The archival pigment print earns its keep here, holding a tonal range that lives almost entirely in the shadows, separating one black petal from the next, keeping the small lit centers sharp so the whole dark garden stays legible.
Look into the throats and you find them: small points of light lodged at the center of flower after flower, a bead of dew or a glint of pollen catching what little brightness reaches this deep into the bed. They are tiny, easy to miss, and they change everything. Without them the picture would be a wall of near-black petunias, indigo bleeding into violet bleeding into a purple so dark it forgets it is a color; with them, the field turns to a night sky, each bloom a small dark constellation.
What Harvey has done is take the most common flower of the summer window box, the petunia any gardener buys by the flat, and photograph it as though it were rare and grave. The blooms crowd edge to edge, their trumpet mouths open, their petals veined with fine silver lines that catch the light like frost on velvet. Here and there a rim flares magenta, a reminder of the daylight version of this plant, before the dark reclaims it. It is a study in how close beauty and mourning can sit.
Harvey, who gardens and works on the coast of Maine and is widely collected by American museums, has built books such as Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb around exactly this: the domestic made strange, the sensory pushed until it aches. The archival pigment print earns its keep here, holding a tonal range that lives almost entirely in the shadows, separating one black petal from the next, keeping the small lit centers sharp so the whole dark garden stays legible.