Fireworks Over Lake Megunticook, Camden, Maine, 2018
Archival Pigment Print.
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
76.2 x 101.6 cm / 30 x 40 in
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 lake is nowhere in the frame, only a low ridge of hills sealing the bottom edge and, above it, a sky of deep marine blue. The water the title promises must be taken on faith, somewhere beneath the falling light. The burst itself is also gone. What remains is a loose constellation of embers, white and rose and gold, drifting down on faint threads, and a small ghost of smoke marking the place where the explosion flowered a second ago. Even the occasion is withheld: something was being celebrated, but the picture does not say what.
Most photographs of fireworks chase the bloom. This one waits a beat and accepts the aftermath, which is the part that resembles memory. At the right edge a dark tree leans in, and a few sparks hang among its leaves like borrowed ornaments, near things and far things briefly confused. Megunticook: the name is older than any festivity held on its shore, and it steadies the picture the way the ridge steadies the sky. Light descends toward a body of water we cannot see, and we believe in it anyway. That belief is the photograph’s real subject.
Harvey lives in Rockport, a few miles from this sky, and her art has long been a domestic lyric of gardens, fog and family, the marvel found close to home. Her books, among them The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet, and her presence in American museum collections, have made that vision widely known. The archival pigment print keeps the blue dense and the embers precise, falling forever.
The lake is nowhere in the frame, only a low ridge of hills sealing the bottom edge and, above it, a sky of deep marine blue. The water the title promises must be taken on faith, somewhere beneath the falling light. The burst itself is also gone. What remains is a loose constellation of embers, white and rose and gold, drifting down on faint threads, and a small ghost of smoke marking the place where the explosion flowered a second ago. Even the occasion is withheld: something was being celebrated, but the picture does not say what.
Most photographs of fireworks chase the bloom. This one waits a beat and accepts the aftermath, which is the part that resembles memory. At the right edge a dark tree leans in, and a few sparks hang among its leaves like borrowed ornaments, near things and far things briefly confused. Megunticook: the name is older than any festivity held on its shore, and it steadies the picture the way the ridge steadies the sky. Light descends toward a body of water we cannot see, and we believe in it anyway. That belief is the photograph’s real subject.
Harvey lives in Rockport, a few miles from this sky, and her art has long been a domestic lyric of gardens, fog and family, the marvel found close to home. Her books, among them The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet, and her presence in American museum collections, have made that vision widely known. The archival pigment print keeps the blue dense and the embers precise, falling forever.