By Russell Hart | Photography by Cig HarveyPhotographer Cig Harvey looks for magic and
meaning in the everyday of a Down Maine life
I
t’s no easy task to describe Cig
Harvey’s photographs in a mean-
ingful way. Words make their sub-
jects seem ordinary and random: a
child’s mouth with a loose baby tooth;
a freshly picked collection of four-leaf
clovers; a bowl of red cherries.
Yet other details vivify these simple
things. Bright red string is wrapped
around the tooth, as if in readiness to
extract it; an ornamental silver platter
has been placed on the grass to display
the clover; diminutive cherry juice
footprints circle the bowl of fruit.
These elements suggest stories and
raise questions in a viewer’s mind.
In the process, whether inhabited by
people or not, Harvey’s photographs
bring transcendence to the common-
place. That quality has led some to
describe her work as surrealism, but
it’s too subtle and too achingly familiar
for that label. It’s really more akin to
literature’s magical realism.
“Along with the mystery, there’s an
optimism and elation in the images
that makes them accessible to people,”
says Michael Mansfield, executive
director and chief curator at Maine’s
Ogunquit Museum of American Art,
where Harvey’s work was on display
in a one-person show through the end
of October 2019.
Yet for Harvey, art doesn’t simply
imitate life. The two are inextrica-
bly connected. Her work may be the
direct product of her own experience,
but it isn’t a visual diary, as with so
much contemporary photography;
it’s an autobiography of feelings and
impressions, not of facts and events.
As with a diary, though, Harvey’s
subjects (if human) are drawn from
friends and family, including her
8-year-old daughter, Scout. Likewise,
the photographs gain much of their
power and meaning from being seen
together, in groups that don’t so muchsuggest a narrative as they do the
rhythms of a family life in rural Maine
and a continuing search for beauty in
small things that might otherwise go
unnoticed. Harvey calls this finding
the rare within the everyday.
Harvey herself organizes her work
into groups that have taken the form
of three published books—collec-
tions with such mystifying titles as
You an Orchestra You a Bomb, Garden-
ing at Night and You Look at Me Like
an Emergency.
The projects’ themes aren’t precon-
ceived, however. “I don’t set out at the
beginning with a particular idea,” she
explains. “It’s a make-see-listen pro-
cess. I have date nights with my photo-
graphs. I put them all up on the wall,
look at what I’ve made and try to see
what direction the work is taking. This
understanding influences the pictures I
do from that point on. What the work
is about slowly rises to the surface.”
Even then, Harvey’s ideas are big.
In her own words, the book You an
Orchestra You a Bomb “makes icons of
the everyday and looks at life on the
threshold between magic and disas-
ter.” Gardening at Night, she says, “is
an exploration of home, family, nature
and time.”
Whatever the work’s direction,
color and natural light remain central
to it. “Light creates awe,” says Harvey,
whose photographs prove that soft
illumination can make colors richer,
contours more sculptural and textures
more distinct. “And I’ve always been
obsessed with color. My earliest mem-
ories revolve around it.”
Her photographs burst with it: Red
pomegranate seeds on a roughhewn
wooden table fairly drip from the
red chair and red wall above them; a
halved green apple is tucked into the
belt of an apple-green gingham dress
with its wearer cropped out of theframe; a luminously turquoise garden
hose snakes into a riotously green, out-
of-focus garden; gum-pink dentures
soak in a jar against a nursery-pink
wall. Such images appeal deeply to the
senses. “Along with color and light,
there’s even the sense of taste to some of
them,” says Mansfield, whose show of
the photographer’s work is titled “Eat-
ing Flowers: Sensations of Cig Harvey.”
...H
arvey’s attraction to Maine
and the pastoral context of
her work both owe some-
thing to the rich, rolling landscape
where she grew up in Devonshire,
England. It was there, at the age of
13, that she discovered the “alchemy”
of photography in a community dark-
room. Harvey arrived in the Pine
Tree State 20 years ago by way of
Barcelona and Bermuda, initially to
earn her MFA at Rockport’s Maine
Media Workshops.
For eight of those early years, until
the birth of her daughter, a full-time
teaching job at the Art Institute of
Boston kept her in the city on week-
days. On weekends, Harvey would
escape back to Maine. She loves teach-
ing as much as her students report-
edly love her, and she still does it at
far-flung workshops in Santa Fe, New
Mexico; Los Angeles and Norway, as
well as in Maine Media Workshops’
low-residency MFA program.
She has lightened her load, though,
because she finds teaching full-time
too all-consuming and exhausting for
her to do her own work at the same
time. Harvey has also taken on edi-
torial and illustration assignments,
including shooting for publications
such as New York and O magazines
and creating covers for novels. (Har-
vey is herself an avid reader of writers,
such as poet Anne Carson, memoirist/ digitalphotopro.com November/December 2019 | 37