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.
A few strokes ago she was still swimming; the faint rings widening from her shoulders admit it. Now she has given up motion, tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and lets the black water hold her the way a hand holds a coin. In a moment she will right herself, find the cold again, swim on; the photograph lives in the pause between, when the body consents to float.
I ought to be impressed by the cliff, that dark ledger of split stone stacked to the top of the frame, shrubs holding on where they can. It is magnificent and it says nothing to me. What reaches me is smaller: the scatter of bright points on the water beside her, spray or starlight, I cannot decide, and her face, lifted, lit from somewhere I cannot locate. Against all that granite indifference, one warm face. The picture pretends to be about landscape; it is about the scandal of a single consciousness afloat in it, tender, unsinkable, briefly excused from gravity.
Harvey works where she lives, on the coast of Maine, and has made of that neighborhood a whole cosmology: gardens, fog, fruit, family, the night. Her books, The Blue Notebook, You an Orchestra a Bomb, Blue Violet, are kept like talismans; museums across the United States hold her prints. In archival pigment the picture keeps its secret economy, acres of near-black laid down smooth, and spends its whole allowance of light on one small floating figure. I would call that an ethics.
A few strokes ago she was still swimming; the faint rings widening from her shoulders admit it. Now she has given up motion, tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and lets the black water hold her the way a hand holds a coin. In a moment she will right herself, find the cold again, swim on; the photograph lives in the pause between, when the body consents to float.
I ought to be impressed by the cliff, that dark ledger of split stone stacked to the top of the frame, shrubs holding on where they can. It is magnificent and it says nothing to me. What reaches me is smaller: the scatter of bright points on the water beside her, spray or starlight, I cannot decide, and her face, lifted, lit from somewhere I cannot locate. Against all that granite indifference, one warm face. The picture pretends to be about landscape; it is about the scandal of a single consciousness afloat in it, tender, unsinkable, briefly excused from gravity.
Harvey works where she lives, on the coast of Maine, and has made of that neighborhood a whole cosmology: gardens, fog, fruit, family, the night. Her books, The Blue Notebook, You an Orchestra a Bomb, Blue Violet, are kept like talismans; museums across the United States hold her prints. In archival pigment the picture keeps its secret economy, acres of near-black laid down smooth, and spends its whole allowance of light on one small floating figure. I would call that an ethics.