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.
Orange this saturated is usually borrowed rather than owned: photographers get it from sunsets, from sodium lamps, or, as here, from fire itself. The color runs its whole register in one frame, ember-red at the tips, apricot in the body of the blaze, a yellow so hot it drains toward white, all of it set into black with no horizon, no room, no floor. And at the center, absurd and composed, sits a small white cake, its sparklers spraying beads of light like a garden fountain.
Fire has no shape of its own; it borrows one from each fraction of a second, and only a camera can call in the loan. These particular curls and volutes existed once, briefly, and will never recur, which makes the picture less a still life than a portrait of an instant’s architecture. There is also a joke folded in, and it is a serious one. The birthday cake is fire at its most domesticated, one tame flame per year. Harvey lets the ritual off its leash: the wish becomes a conflagration, smoke rolling off the top of the frame, sparks drifting loose at the left, while the frosting, improbably, holds.
Made in Boothbay, on the Maine coast where Harvey lives and works, the picture extends the sensory lyric of her books The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet, in which domestic sweetness is always one degree from danger. As an archival pigment print it keeps these temperatures fixed: black absolute, orange incandescent, one small celebration burning at full scale.
Orange this saturated is usually borrowed rather than owned: photographers get it from sunsets, from sodium lamps, or, as here, from fire itself. The color runs its whole register in one frame, ember-red at the tips, apricot in the body of the blaze, a yellow so hot it drains toward white, all of it set into black with no horizon, no room, no floor. And at the center, absurd and composed, sits a small white cake, its sparklers spraying beads of light like a garden fountain.
Fire has no shape of its own; it borrows one from each fraction of a second, and only a camera can call in the loan. These particular curls and volutes existed once, briefly, and will never recur, which makes the picture less a still life than a portrait of an instant’s architecture. There is also a joke folded in, and it is a serious one. The birthday cake is fire at its most domesticated, one tame flame per year. Harvey lets the ritual off its leash: the wish becomes a conflagration, smoke rolling off the top of the frame, sparks drifting loose at the left, while the frosting, improbably, holds.
Made in Boothbay, on the Maine coast where Harvey lives and works, the picture extends the sensory lyric of her books The Blue Notebook and Blue Violet, in which domestic sweetness is always one degree from danger. As an archival pigment print it keeps these temperatures fixed: black absolute, orange incandescent, one small celebration burning at full scale.