Blue Violet: Cig Harvey

photo-eye Gallery is pleased to announce Blue Violet: Photographs and Text by Cig Harvey, an online solo exhibition by renowned photographer Cig Harvey. This exhibition corresponds with Harvey's recent photobook Blue Violet, published by The Monacelli Press.

In the vein of magical realism, rooted in her personal experience, Cig Harvey frames a series of allegorical narratives in Blue Violet, that elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary. The exquisite palette, the soft light and deep contrast of her imagery, the subtle drawings and poetic language, evoke dreamy yet profound emotional images that illustrate the relationship of the human condition to the natural world.

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photo-eye Conversations: Cig Harvey and Anne Kelly

Roses (Yellow Car) © Cig Harvey

ABOUT THE ARTWORK
"Blue Violet is a celebration of the natural world and the senses. Blue Violet is a vibrant meditation on the procession of seasons, sensory abundance, and the magic in everyday life." - Cig Harvey

Part art book, botanical guide, historical encyclopedia, and poetry collection, Blue Violet is a compendium of beauty, color, and the senses.

Plants, flowers, and our experience of the natural world are the threads that tie this unique book together. Exploring the five senses, Blue Violet takes the reader on a personal journey through nature and the range of human emotions.

As with her previous three titles - You Look At Me Like An Emergency, Gardening at Night, and You an Orchestra You a Bomb - this book invites the reader to pause, laugh, cry, create, and become more aware of the natural world. Images and text in a variety of forms (prose poetry, recipes, lists, research pieces, diagrams) focus on immediate experience to understand the vibrancy of the senses on memory and feelings.

Poppies © Cig Harvey

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Cig Harvey is an artist who uses images and language to explore sensory experience and elevate the everyday. Rich in implied narrative, deeply rooted in the natural world, her work is devoted to the topic of what it is to feel. Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, BBC, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, Vice, The Sunday Times, The Independent, Marie Claire Italia, and New York Magazine. Cig Harvey's work is included in permanent collections of major institutions including, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine. Harvey was named one of the 2021 recipients of the Farnsworth's Maine in America Award and was named the 2018 Prix Virginia Laureate, an international photography award based out of Paris, among many other honors. Harvey has published three previous sold out monographs the first of which: You Look At Me Like An Emergency, was accompanied by a solo museum show at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway in Spring 2012. The artist lives and works in rural Maine.

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Cig Harvey by Ann Jastrab
The 2018 Prix Virginia has been awarded to Cig Harvey

Ferns © Cig Harvey

Scout & The Pansies © Cig Harvey

Michael Joseph: Lost & Found

By Michael Joseph

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2024 | 144 pages

Lost & Found documents a contemporary American subculture of young Travelers through raw, striking portraiture and intimate storytelling. These Travelers abandon home to move around the country by hitchhiking and freight train hopping in a nomadic, transient existence outside of mainstream society. Along their personal journey driven by wanderlust, escapism, or a search for transient jobs, they find a new family in their traveling friends.

The high of freedom, however, does not come without consequence. The black and white portraits are made in public, on the street, using natural light. Individual stories, as a collection, form a greater narrative. Over ten years in the making, Joseph’s portraits reveal the human condition. They capture courage, tenderness, and determination in his subjects that have been largely ignored and unseen.

An incredible book that we highly recommend! All About Photo

All About Michael Joseph

Nick Brandt: Sink / Rise, The Day May Break: Chapter Three

By Nick Brandt

Publisher : Hatje Cantz

2024 | 120 pages

Through his widely acclaimed work, English photographer Nick Brandt (1964) addresses pressing environmental issues, consistently highlighting mankind’s impact upon the natural world. His work is truly a fusion of artistry and activism, and he is best known for capturing the majestic landscapes of Africa as well as intimate portraits of its wildlife. Sink / Rise is the third chapter of The Day May Break, an ongoing global series portraying ecological degradation and destruction. This chapter adopts a slightly different approach than its predecessors: taking humans, rather than animals or landscapes, as his subjects. Sink / Rise focuses on South Pacific Islanders impacted by rising oceans from climate change. The people in these photos, photographed underwater in the ocean off the coast of the Fijian islands, are local representatives of the many people whose homes, land and livelihoods will be lost in the coming decades as the water rises. In Brandt’s images, the Islanders sit down at tables, stand on chairs and embrace―all the while, their pinched expressions reveal the desperation of their asphyxiating condition.

All About Nick Brandt

Lisa McCord: Rotan Switch

By Lisa McCord:

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2024 | 204 pages

Rotan Switch is the first monograph by Lisa McCord, documenting life on her grandparents’ cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta community of Rotan. It takes its name from the community’s central landmark—the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Delta. Although it hasn’t been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice. Collected over the last forty-four years, these images and stories are a reflection on the people and places that have taught McCord the meaning of the word home. It is also a self-exploration into her inherently complicated role in this community as both the photographer and the granddaughter of the farm owner.
This publication is a long-term project, constructed from McCord's analog photographs, family snapshots and ephemera. Including, monochrome photographs, color polaroids, and recipes.

Christer Strömholm

By Christer Strömholm

Publisher : Dewi Lewis Publishing

2024 | 296 pages

Christer Strömholm is recognised as one of the major figures of 20th century European photography. Strömholm captured his surroundings in black‐and‐white images that display his integrity, understated humour and a highly personal aesthetic. With an unmistakable sensitivity to human suffering, based on his personal experience, he took photography in a new direction. Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian, has described him “as the father of Swedish photography both for his abiding influence and for his role as a teacher.”

Blue Violet: Cig Harvey

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Selected Books