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.
Glamour almost always lives in a face, and this picture gambles by refusing to show one. What fills the frame instead is the shaggy white flank of a Dartmoor pony, cropped so severely that head and legs fall away and only the animal’s coat remains, a landscape of cream and dirty gold combed by wind. The gamble pays, and pays with interest. Deprived of eyes to meet, we are handed pure texture, and texture turns out to be plenty.
The range of whites here is worth savoring: the long mane along the spine catches sun and separates into silver threads, while lower down the wool clots into tan and biscuit and a smudge of muddy brown. Behind it, a hard blue Devon sky is stacked with cumulus, bright and theatrical, giving the creature a backdrop worthy of a cover shoot. The composition has real swagger. Dry grass runs along the bottom, all that fur fills the middle, the weather performs above, and everything moves slightly, nothing posed yet somehow perfectly styled.
Cig Harvey came to the United States from England and has since built, out of Maine light and English memory, one of the more sensuous bodies of work in contemporary color photography; her books circulate widely and her prints enter American museum collections. She has an editor’s instinct for when to withhold the obvious, here the whole idea of a portrait. Issued as an archival pigment print, the image renders every filament of that coat with a fashion photographer’s love of surface. It is a portrait after all, only of a coat.
Glamour almost always lives in a face, and this picture gambles by refusing to show one. What fills the frame instead is the shaggy white flank of a Dartmoor pony, cropped so severely that head and legs fall away and only the animal’s coat remains, a landscape of cream and dirty gold combed by wind. The gamble pays, and pays with interest. Deprived of eyes to meet, we are handed pure texture, and texture turns out to be plenty.
The range of whites here is worth savoring: the long mane along the spine catches sun and separates into silver threads, while lower down the wool clots into tan and biscuit and a smudge of muddy brown. Behind it, a hard blue Devon sky is stacked with cumulus, bright and theatrical, giving the creature a backdrop worthy of a cover shoot. The composition has real swagger. Dry grass runs along the bottom, all that fur fills the middle, the weather performs above, and everything moves slightly, nothing posed yet somehow perfectly styled.
Cig Harvey came to the United States from England and has since built, out of Maine light and English memory, one of the more sensuous bodies of work in contemporary color photography; her books circulate widely and her prints enter American museum collections. She has an editor’s instinct for when to withhold the obvious, here the whole idea of a portrait. Issued as an archival pigment print, the image renders every filament of that coat with a fashion photographer’s love of surface. It is a portrait after all, only of a coat.