Maggie and the Rose Hip Petals, Rockport, 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.
How did Maggie get underwater? For a moment the picture insists on it: white hair adrift like something loosed on a tide, pink petals floating above her. Then the surface confesses. Those streaks are sky reflected; the dark arm at the lower left is a windscreen wiper; the little dotted band in the corner belongs to a car’s glass. Maggie is not drowning at all. She is sitting in a parked car while rose hip petals settle on the windshield, and we are outside, looking down through the weather of reflections.
Any woman photographed beneath scattered petals gets conscripted into the Ophelia business: the beautiful drowned, the flowery drift. Harvey signs Maggie up and then quietly cancels the subscription. The drowning here is strictly optical. Note how the petals, pressed to the glass, are the sharpest things here, while Maggie, whom we care about, goes soft as a rumor beneath them. Photography usually equates focus with importance; this picture reverses the exchange rate. The nearest things are trivia, crisp trivia, and the blurred silver head below carries all the meaning.
Rockport, Maine, is Harvey’s home ground; the title roots Maggie, the petals and the parked moment right there. Her pictures keep finding the extraordinary in the driveway: gardens, fruit, fog, the people she lives among. The books that gather this world, You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet among them, have devoted readers, and American museums collect the prints. This one, an archival pigment print, holds both registers at once, each petal exact, the silver hair dissolving. Ophelia, it turns out, can simply drive away.
How did Maggie get underwater? For a moment the picture insists on it: white hair adrift like something loosed on a tide, pink petals floating above her. Then the surface confesses. Those streaks are sky reflected; the dark arm at the lower left is a windscreen wiper; the little dotted band in the corner belongs to a car’s glass. Maggie is not drowning at all. She is sitting in a parked car while rose hip petals settle on the windshield, and we are outside, looking down through the weather of reflections.
Any woman photographed beneath scattered petals gets conscripted into the Ophelia business: the beautiful drowned, the flowery drift. Harvey signs Maggie up and then quietly cancels the subscription. The drowning here is strictly optical. Note how the petals, pressed to the glass, are the sharpest things here, while Maggie, whom we care about, goes soft as a rumor beneath them. Photography usually equates focus with importance; this picture reverses the exchange rate. The nearest things are trivia, crisp trivia, and the blurred silver head below carries all the meaning.
Rockport, Maine, is Harvey’s home ground; the title roots Maggie, the petals and the parked moment right there. Her pictures keep finding the extraordinary in the driveway: gardens, fruit, fog, the people she lives among. The books that gather this world, You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet among them, have devoted readers, and American museums collect the prints. This one, an archival pigment print, holds both registers at once, each petal exact, the silver hair dissolving. Ophelia, it turns out, can simply drive away.