Earlier this year in a discussion about her work, a friend of Cig Harvey's told the UK-born, Maine-based photographer that she had dedicated her life to something that doesn’t exist.
"He said, ‘color isn’t real; it’s just our brain’s interpretation of light wavelengths,’ Harvey reveals. She says she's been annoyed ever since.
That's perhaps unsurprising for a photographer who was working in a dark room at the age of 13, and has been obsessed with color since childhood.
"I do think it's a lifelong obsession that I'm working through. We all perceive colors slightly differently and there's so much around color that is unknown, and I love that. All of my work, has always been about color. How can I use color as a tool of making people pay attention?"
With her new limited edition Wisteria, 2025 Harvey continues her signature exploration of light, color, and narrative, capturing a fleeting, almost dreamlike, moment. Wisteria, 2025 portrays a lone figure, her friend Emily, draped in lush purple blooms, almost as one with the surrounding landscape, blurring the distinction between human and nature.
“I think for me, the pictures with the figures are this pulling back to the fact that it's about the body, birth almost; and that's pretty basic," she tells Artspace in our interview below.
"It's not about what the pictures are actually of. It's about what they’re about, and what it is to have sensation and to live in the body. I want to get you first in the gut and I think that's the idea of using beauty as a way to first make someone care without the intellect, gut first.”
Wisteria, 2025 is an archival pigment print on heavyweight paper, measuring 8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm). It is signed, dated, and numbered on verso and is an edition of 30, priced $795 per print. Each limited edition is encased in a custom portfolio and includes a copy of Emerald Drifters, the artist’s latest book published by Monacelli.
Harvey's work has been featured in The New York Times , Vogue , and The Wall Street Journal . She is represented by Robert Mann Gallery (New York), Peter Fetterman Gallery, (Los Angeles), Jackson Fine Art (Atlanta), Robert Klein Gallery (Boston), Dowling Walsh Gallery (Maine), and Bildhalle (Switzerland & The Netherlands). She has exhibited worldwide including at Paris Photo, Art Miami, and AIPAD (New York) for the past twenty years. On the eve of its release, we asked Harvey a few questions about Wisteria, 2025.
Edition photographed by Garrett Carroll
Why did you choose this particular photograph for an edition? I feel like in many ways, this image is symbolic of the whole book, Emerald Drifters. I wanted the image to be a figurative one because the work isn't about the subject matter. It's about what it is to be human. And I really embraced this idea of the figure embracing this wisteria, embracing color.
There's something about wisteria. It's very British. I love wisteria because it's an everyday plant. It's prolific. It takes over houses. I have wisteria at my house. It's incredible, but people are always telling me, ‘oh, you need to cut that back’. I pretend I can't hear them.
Edition photographed by Garrett Carroll
What do you remember about making the photograph? I really love the story about how I made this picture. I think that was another part of why I chose it for the edition.
I was trying something where I was driving a different route home every day, just to surprise myself. It was a really good lesson for me; this idea of breaking routine, breaking monotony. So I was taking all the side roads and just taking a different route to see what I could see.
The response I want people to have from my work - when they go to a gallery show, or when they turn the page of a book - I want a little gasp. That's the ultimate. It doesn't always happen, sometimes never happens. But for people to feel it in their gut, feel it in their body, rather than intellectually; that's what I'm after. And that's also what I'm after when I'm searching for the photograph.
It was a June. Wisteria blooms late in Maine because everything happens late in Maine. Spring is in May. I turned the corner on a street I've never driven down, in Camden, Maine, a little town. And I saw this house, and it was like something out of a fairy tale. This wisteria had literally taken over the entire house. It was so beautiful. And the year that I made the photograph, 2021, it was at its apogee. When I saw the photograph again it was a reminder that things don't stay the same.
You can’t tell yourself you're going to go back some other time and make that picture, because things change. Life moves on. It’s never the same picture twice, because the light changes, or the world is different, or things get knocked down, or things die.
I knocked on the door and this woman called Judi comes out. I asked if I could make the picture, and we ended up just bonding. We shared the same birthday, and I definitely think there must be this Cancerian trait, this love of maximalism. People had also been telling her that she needed to cut it down for years and years too. It was wild. The whole house was covered in it.
I wish I had a drone picture of it because you wouldn't believe the extent to which it had taken over the house. It definitely must have been pulling the house this way and that, but I love that she didn’t care. I ended up photographing it every which way. I made portraits, I made classical landscape photographs, I photographed from the inside, and from the outside. I even took ladders over.
Edition photographed by Garrett Carroll
It’s a very tactile image, you wonder what it might be like to be engulfed in all that plant life. Yeah, the viewer perhaps put themselves in that space, rather than being distant from it. One thing that you don't get to see, and which I wish I had done a video of, were the bees! There is all of this natural phenomena going on and all of the senses that the moment connected to. I think it's such a reminder, in an age of technology, that actually the best things are wisteria, phosphorescence, these things that don’t cost anything.
You occasionally put people in landscape, who's the person in this image? Her name's Emily. She's a friend of mine and she’s actually in a lot of the images in Emerald Drifters . We're great friends and we work really well together. She always says that she never, ever regrets going on a photo shoot with me. For me, it's such a reminder, regardless of whether the pictures are any good, to break routine and to go and have fun. Meet at midnight, go night swimming, find the fireflies, or get up at dawn and see the light or be in a field. Fill in the blank.
So we always end up making something that I didn't necessarily plan. She's game for anything. It’s all about how we can make something that is, not only magical in the picture, but feels magical in the moment, feels outside of a daily experience, even though we might just be driving a mile down the road.
What does the inclusion of a person in your photographs signify for you? I think for me, the pictures with the figures are this pulling back to the fact that it's about the body, birth almost; and that's pretty basic. I think that's what it does. It's not about what the pictures are actually of. It's about what they’re about, and what it is to have sensation and to live in the body. I want to get you first in the gut and I think that's the idea of using beauty as a way to first make someone care like without the intellect, gut first.
Edition photographed by Garrett Carroll
How important are ‘props’ in your practice, eg: in this case, the dress Emily is wearing? That’s another thing about this photograph. I found that dress at a Goodwill. It was five dollars, 15 years ago. That is part of my process, too, which I don't talk about very often. That dress was in the studio for 15 years, just waiting for its moment, which is kind of cool, but then these things just happen, so I really am paying attention. I'll go to Goodwill. I'll find these props. But they may take years to get used.
How do you feel when you send an edition out, knowing that it’s going to be hanging on walls across the world? I love it! I think that that’s the privilege of editions. I feel so grateful for any work that sells, and goes on and has its own life. But this image seems to have really tapped into something in people. I think, in many ways, it’s because it's so simple and yet so wild. It's such a reminder of the beauty of every day.
Is your relationship with color like a series of mini obsessions that follow you around or is it more a linear narrative? It's something that I was obsessed with as a kid and has just gone on and on, and I'm leaning really more and more into it. A lot of the book, Emerald Drifters , is about the physics of our eyes and how we see, how we live with color, and how we don't actually know how what we see affects us. We all perceive colors slightly differently and there's so much around color that is unknown, and I love that. I do think it's a lifelong obsession that I'm working through. All of my books, all of my work, has always been about color. How can I use color as a tool of making people pay attention?
How has photography developed for you over the years? As you get better at some things do you have to ‘unlearn’ other things? Totally. For me, starting to photograph at night, opened up this. The way colors appear out of the dark was really exciting, and the way that the camera saw in a way that my eyes didn't, was really surprising. I’ve been in this a while. I worked in a dark room at the age of 13. I've been very single-minded about how I’ve wanted to live my life with photography and writing. So it is trying to unlearn, to try and see through the camera in a new way. While I think with all my work you can maybe see how one thing might have led to another, there's always something that is new and explorative for me in it.
Take a closer look at Wisteria, 2025 here and buy Emerald Drifters here.
