You Look At Me Like An Emergency by Cig Harvey

YOU

ME

ME

EMERGENC Y

EMERGENC Y

FOR

ISBN 978 90 5330 771 7 © 2012 (Photography and text) Cig Harvey, Rockport, Maine www.cigharvey.com © 2012 (Text) Vicki Goldberg, Waterville Valley, NH www.vickigoldberg.com © 2012 (Text) Selene Wendt, Oslo www.stenersen.museum.no © 2012 Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam www.schiltpublishing.com Edit Cig Harvey & Deb Wood Text correction Kumar Jamdagni, Zwolle www.language-matters.nl Design and Hand Lettering Deb Wood, Brooklyn, NY www.hellodebwood.com Printing Wachter GmbH & Co. KG, Bönnigheim (D) www.wachter.de

Distribution in North America: Ingram Publisher Services One Ingram Blvd.

LaVergne, TN 37086 IPS: 866-765-0179 e-mail: customer.service@ingrampublisherservices.com Distribution in The Netherlands: Centraal Boekhuis https://portal.boekhuis.nl/cbonline/boek-verkopers Phone: +31 (0)345 47 58 88 e-mail: detailhandel@centraal.boekhuis.nl Distribution in all other countries: Thames & Hudson Ltd 181a High Holborn London WC1 V 7QX Phone: +44 (0)20 7845 5000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7845 5055 e-mail: sales@thameshudson.co.uk

FOR

ISBN 978 90 5330 771 7 © 2012 (Photography and text) Cig Harvey, Rockport, Maine www.cigharvey.com © 2012 (Text) Vicki Goldberg, Waterville Valley, NH www.vickigoldberg.com © 2012 (Text) Selene Wendt, Oslo www.stenersen.museum.no © 2012 Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam www.schiltpublishing.com Edit Cig Harvey & Deb Wood Text correction Kumar Jamdagni, Zwolle www.language-matters.nl Design and Hand Lettering Deb Wood, Brooklyn, NY www.hellodebwood.com Printing Wachter GmbH & Co. KG, Bönnigheim (D) www.wachter.de

Distribution in North America: Ingram Publisher Services One Ingram Blvd.

LaVergne, TN 37086 IPS: 866-765-0179 e-mail: customer.service@ingrampublisherservices.com Distribution in The Netherlands: Centraal Boekhuis https://portal.boekhuis.nl/cbonline/boek-verkopers Phone: +31 (0)345 47 58 88 e-mail: detailhandel@centraal.boekhuis.nl Distribution in all other countries: Thames & Hudson Ltd 181a High Holborn London WC1 V 7QX Phone: +44 (0)20 7845 5000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7845 5055 e-mail: sales@thameshudson.co.uk

O F F - C O M PA S S A C C O M PA N I E D B Y A N I M P

VICKI GOLDBERG

Cig Harvey’s world has a tendency to veer about twenty degrees north of expectations.

It’s barely possible that an imp hides in her camera—it might even be an imp that moonlights as a mystery writer—and what do you know, it steals out now and then to put its stamp on her photographs. How else to explain a girl quite pleased with a huge leaf of rhubarb on her head, or a woman in a dress standing on a buoy in the middle of the ocean? Oh bother, trying to answer questions like these would be rather like trying to explain a piano concerto, or, for that matter, love. I’d gladly settle for the influence of an imp. However they came about, pictures that pose such entertaining and unanswerable questions map out a decidedly individual and delightfully offcompass realm.

Which brings up the question of whether explanations are a suitable answer to photographs. Some things are meant to be experienced, not parsed. It’s true that certain photographs cry out for elucidation (or at least captions). If they’re news photographs, it’s useful to know whether you’re seeing friend or foe, Cambodia or Afghanistan. If the images are from unfamiliar cultures with myths and politics beyond our ken, we need help. But abstract photographs like Francis Bruguiere’s cut-paper abstractions in the 1920s or Shinichi Maruyama’s recent photographs of jets of paint flung into mid air? We know how they were made, but the real response lies out beyond the facts.

Cig Harvey’s photographs don’t really need rational deciphering anyway; taken whole without too much interference, they set mind and imagination dancing. Besides, most of them are quite comprehensible images of things and events that ordinarily would be . . . ordinary, but an idiosyncratic viewpoint, or a whim, or a fillip, ricochets quietly off first impressions. A bowl of maraschino cherries sits on the floor—hmm, the floor—with a couple of red footprints beside it. That’s clear enough, yet it’s not where your everyday bowl of cherries sits, and it could occur to you that people seldom step

O F F - C O M PA S S A C C O M PA N I E D B Y A N I M P

VICKI GOLDBERG

Cig Harvey’s world has a tendency to veer about twenty degrees north of expectations.

It’s barely possible that an imp hides in her camera—it might even be an imp that moonlights as a mystery writer—and what do you know, it steals out now and then to put its stamp on her photographs. How else to explain a girl quite pleased with a huge leaf of rhubarb on her head, or a woman in a dress standing on a buoy in the middle of the ocean? Oh bother, trying to answer questions like these would be rather like trying to explain a piano concerto, or, for that matter, love. I’d gladly settle for the influence of an imp. However they came about, pictures that pose such entertaining and unanswerable questions map out a decidedly individual and delightfully offcompass realm.

Which brings up the question of whether explanations are a suitable answer to photographs. Some things are meant to be experienced, not parsed. It’s true that certain photographs cry out for elucidation (or at least captions). If they’re news photographs, it’s useful to know whether you’re seeing friend or foe, Cambodia or Afghanistan. If the images are from unfamiliar cultures with myths and politics beyond our ken, we need help. But abstract photographs like Francis Bruguiere’s cut-paper abstractions in the 1920s or Shinichi Maruyama’s recent photographs of jets of paint flung into mid air? We know how they were made, but the real response lies out beyond the facts.

Cig Harvey’s photographs don’t really need rational deciphering anyway; taken whole without too much interference, they set mind and imagination dancing. Besides, most of them are quite comprehensible images of things and events that ordinarily would be . . . ordinary, but an idiosyncratic viewpoint, or a whim, or a fillip, ricochets quietly off first impressions. A bowl of maraschino cherries sits on the floor—hmm, the floor—with a couple of red footprints beside it. That’s clear enough, yet it’s not where your everyday bowl of cherries sits, and it could occur to you that people seldom step

in maraschino cherries barefoot. Since vision and emotion come first, art has a habit of provoking afterthoughts. First one savors the gleam of red fruit and the smooth chalky blue of floorboards worn down here and there to pink; only afterwards does reason chime in. Same with Monet’s Nymphéas: viewers float on water and clouds and lilies before remembering to wonder which way is up.

As for the cherries, there’s more: it’s written on, and the words ignore cherries in favor of brown shoes. (You see what I mean about an imp.) Emergency is a love story, written in two languages—some scraps from a journal, whole chapters from a camera.

(The word “photography” literally means “writing with light.”) The story begins with a photograph of Harvey lying on a table with a big lamp staring down at her as if for interrogation, but the pictures only dip into the forlorn now and then, and after a while love barrels in like an angel hurrying to offload a cargo of blessings.

Minor events end up startled into eccentric life by uncommon color, unlikely situations, and unexplained light. A woman in a pale pink dress sits despondently in a hall that wavers between electric blue and muddy olive green while a neon-green exit sign hovers overhead. A girl lies on her back in a wheat-colored dress with green lines across it and old-fashioned roller skates with green wheels, on a green tennis court with strict white lines. Another girl lies on a rusty-orange velvet couch before a black wall; light borrowed from Caravaggio paints red rings under her eyes.

Then there are scrumptious children who are cast as themselves and play their roles with the range of Old Vic troupers. A girl as steadfast and stolid as a nineteenthcentury portrait subject regards us from the rear window of a red pickup truck that came to rest in a field of snow. Another girl sits in a library, her feet dangling so far above the floor the chair might be oversized. Darkness and shadow suggest a rather gothic introduction to books, yet light shines on the child’s face, her lustrous robin’segg-blue blouse, and her pink-banded shoes. It’s her expression that is so captivating, her lowered head and raised eyes and tight little smile that says, ‘I know exactly what I’m doing and it’s just a touch sly.’

These are staged photographs, staged mysteries even, but sometimes serendipity (or that imp) lends a hand at the last moment. What is a beautiful young woman doing in a field with a birdhouse in hand on a summer evening when water and sky have melded into a curtain of blue? She might be on a special mission devised

by the photographer, but said photographer could not have turned on the fireflies or bid a single star to shine on the proceedings. And what is a girl doing in a long dress in the high grass, regarding us appraisingly and holding a baby doll facing her chest as if it were in a snuggly, and however did it happen that the dog, who could scarcely be counted on to listen to a prompter, posed so perfectly aslant and looked off in the other direction to complete the picture?

The unexpected keeps raising its head, even as it erases most everyone else’s.

Sensing that the camera is probably not privacy’s best buddy, unpredictable events decide to come between them. The lovers (and some others who have just dropped by) ardently conceal their identities. He covers up his face by thrusting a rooster in front of it—possibly the only such image in history. She covers her face with a portrait

by Perugino, elsewhere hefts a trunk so high the lens can’t find her head. Other people lurk behind camouflage: a young girl stands on the far side of a glass chandelier; only one eye peeks through. A woman submerges three quarters of her face in a rabidly blooming yellow bush. Several female figures are cut off at the neck, rendered as headless as Greek statues by a viewfinder rather than by that everyday destroyer, time.

Taken all in all, this is surely the most innovative approach to anonymity since mobsters in police custody started hiding their noses behind fedoras.

Photographs like these have the unlikely charm and openness of a question mark, leaving plenty of room for imagination to prance about if it has a mind to. Better still, they don’t demand an answer, or an explanation, any more than music does—or, for that matter, love, which comes bearing questions but without any question has an imp in tow.

in maraschino cherries barefoot. Since vision and emotion come first, art has a habit of provoking afterthoughts. First one savors the gleam of red fruit and the smooth chalky blue of floorboards worn down here and there to pink; only afterwards does reason chime in. Same with Monet’s Nymphéas: viewers float on water and clouds and lilies before remembering to wonder which way is up.

As for the cherries, there’s more: it’s written on, and the words ignore cherries in favor of brown shoes. (You see what I mean about an imp.) Emergency is a love story, written in two languages—some scraps from a journal, whole chapters from a camera.

(The word “photography” literally means “writing with light.”) The story begins with a photograph of Harvey lying on a table with a big lamp staring down at her as if for interrogation, but the pictures only dip into the forlorn now and then, and after a while love barrels in like an angel hurrying to offload a cargo of blessings.

Minor events end up startled into eccentric life by uncommon color, unlikely situations, and unexplained light. A woman in a pale pink dress sits despondently in a hall that wavers between electric blue and muddy olive green while a neon-green exit sign hovers overhead. A girl lies on her back in a wheat-colored dress with green lines across it and old-fashioned roller skates with green wheels, on a green tennis court with strict white lines. Another girl lies on a rusty-orange velvet couch before a black wall; light borrowed from Caravaggio paints red rings under her eyes.

Then there are scrumptious children who are cast as themselves and play their roles with the range of Old Vic troupers. A girl as steadfast and stolid as a nineteenthcentury portrait subject regards us from the rear window of a red pickup truck that came to rest in a field of snow. Another girl sits in a library, her feet dangling so far above the floor the chair might be oversized. Darkness and shadow suggest a rather gothic introduction to books, yet light shines on the child’s face, her lustrous robin’segg-blue blouse, and her pink-banded shoes. It’s her expression that is so captivating, her lowered head and raised eyes and tight little smile that says, ‘I know exactly what I’m doing and it’s just a touch sly.’

These are staged photographs, staged mysteries even, but sometimes serendipity (or that imp) lends a hand at the last moment. What is a beautiful young woman doing in a field with a birdhouse in hand on a summer evening when water and sky have melded into a curtain of blue? She might be on a special mission devised

by the photographer, but said photographer could not have turned on the fireflies or bid a single star to shine on the proceedings. And what is a girl doing in a long dress in the high grass, regarding us appraisingly and holding a baby doll facing her chest as if it were in a snuggly, and however did it happen that the dog, who could scarcely be counted on to listen to a prompter, posed so perfectly aslant and looked off in the other direction to complete the picture?

The unexpected keeps raising its head, even as it erases most everyone else’s.

Sensing that the camera is probably not privacy’s best buddy, unpredictable events decide to come between them. The lovers (and some others who have just dropped by) ardently conceal their identities. He covers up his face by thrusting a rooster in front of it—possibly the only such image in history. She covers her face with a portrait

by Perugino, elsewhere hefts a trunk so high the lens can’t find her head. Other people lurk behind camouflage: a young girl stands on the far side of a glass chandelier; only one eye peeks through. A woman submerges three quarters of her face in a rabidly blooming yellow bush. Several female figures are cut off at the neck, rendered as headless as Greek statues by a viewfinder rather than by that everyday destroyer, time.

Taken all in all, this is surely the most innovative approach to anonymity since mobsters in police custody started hiding their noses behind fedoras.

Photographs like these have the unlikely charm and openness of a question mark, leaving plenty of room for imagination to prance about if it has a mind to. Better still, they don’t demand an answer, or an explanation, any more than music does—or, for that matter, love, which comes bearing questions but without any question has an imp in tow.