critic Maggie Nelson and magical
realist Gabriel García Márquez.)
Not surprisingly, given her strong
sense of color and texture and the
importance of clothing in her pho-
tographs, she has even garnered the
attention of fashion houses Kate Spade
and Ralph Lauren. “I’ve really enjoyed
the collaborative aspect of it,” she says,
“but I’m happiest when the work
doesn’t have to sell anything other
than itself.”
Given how much of Harvey’s fine-
art work is “found,” or at least seems
to be, it’s hard to imagine her work-
ing within the constraints of an ad
campaign. That doesn’t mean there’s
no planning or preparation to back up
the happenstance on which her photo-
graphs depend. She might ask to meet
a subject at a beach at dawn, when she
knows fog will be rolling in, having
told that person the idea she has in
mind, and sometimes what to wear—
perhaps from Harvey’s own collection
of vintage dresses, which she herself
often donned for the frequent self-por-
traits she made earlier in her career. At
that point, she says, the work becomes
“a collaboration, not a transaction.”
Sometimes adding a prop—a mir-
ror, a red balloon, the wings of a
white witch moth—allows Harvey to
explore her subjects thoroughly, a task
made easier by her increasing use of
digital cameras, currently a mirror-
less, medium-format digital Fuji GFX
50R. (Her images are usually cropped
to a square format.)
With minimal coaching, she oftenlets her subjects move freely through
a scene while she herself moves in
relation to them. “I might shoot them
from 2 inches away, then 100 yards
away,” she says. While there’s almost
always a human presence in the
images, often it’s a mere suggestion—
a hand, a distant silhouette, the back of
someone’s head.
An element of accident is essential to
the results. “The best pictures are often
the ones that surprise you,” Harvey
says. Robert Klein, whose eponymous
Boston gallery has hosted several one-
person shows of Harvey’s work, thinks
this characterization understates the
photographer’s talent.
“They say that chance favors the
prepared mind,” he observes. “The
seemingly casual quality of her work“The Pomegranate Seeds, Scout,” 2012
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