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.
There must have been swimming just before this: effort, splash, the small comedy of staying afloat. The photograph begins where all that ends. The water has gone black and nearly calm again, scattered with sparks of caught light, and the face of a woman lies upon it, eyes closed, as if set down there deliberately, like a coin laid on dark velvet. I arrive, as one always does with photographs, just after.
What detains me is not the dark, though the dark is total at the edges, but the glitter: a spill of white points running diagonally across the lake like a constellation that has agreed to lie down. Because of it I cannot fix the scene. She floats on water; she drifts among stars; the picture consents to both readings and refuses to arbitrate. And then the eyelids. Their composure is excessive, more perfect than sleep ever requires. A floating woman with closed eyes belongs to two stories, rest and drowning, and the photograph, tender and merciless, declines to tell me which one I am in.
Harvey photographs the people and waters of her life in midcoast Maine, and this lake lies within that intimate radius of home. Her books, The Blue Notebook among them, have made the domestic image newly strange; American museums collect and exhibit her prints. This one, an archival pigment print, keeps the blacks deep enough to swim in and each spark distinct. Photography here does what water does: it holds a face, beautifully, without saying for how long.
There must have been swimming just before this: effort, splash, the small comedy of staying afloat. The photograph begins where all that ends. The water has gone black and nearly calm again, scattered with sparks of caught light, and the face of a woman lies upon it, eyes closed, as if set down there deliberately, like a coin laid on dark velvet. I arrive, as one always does with photographs, just after.
What detains me is not the dark, though the dark is total at the edges, but the glitter: a spill of white points running diagonally across the lake like a constellation that has agreed to lie down. Because of it I cannot fix the scene. She floats on water; she drifts among stars; the picture consents to both readings and refuses to arbitrate. And then the eyelids. Their composure is excessive, more perfect than sleep ever requires. A floating woman with closed eyes belongs to two stories, rest and drowning, and the photograph, tender and merciless, declines to tell me which one I am in.
Harvey photographs the people and waters of her life in midcoast Maine, and this lake lies within that intimate radius of home. Her books, The Blue Notebook among them, have made the domestic image newly strange; American museums collect and exhibit her prints. This one, an archival pigment print, keeps the blacks deep enough to swim in and each spark distinct. Photography here does what water does: it holds a face, beautifully, without saying for how long.