Cig Harvey: Eat Flowers

 Cig Harvey’s photographs in Blue Violet are a celebration of the natural world and the senses with her magical use of color and wonder found in everyday life. “I want my photographs to be sensory, like edible flowers, a visual taste. Color and flowers act as symbol and metaphor to access our senses,” Harvey says. One of the most extraordinary color photographers working today, Cig Harvey’s Blue Violet is a meditation on the procession of seasons and sensory abundance. Plants, flowers, and our experience of the natural world are the threads that tie this unique body of work together. Exploring the five senses, Blue Violet takes the reader on a personal journey through nature and the range of human emotions.

Throughout her twenty-five-year career, Harvey’s work “has always incited a jolt, eliciting a reflexive gasp of awe, triggered by memory and emotion,” writes Jacoba Urist in the book’s afterword. “In this regard, Blue Violet is no exception,” she continues, “and readers may be forgiven for assuming this, her fourth monograph, is about botanicals.” Yet further viewing of the works reveals that Harvey’s photographs “despite being of flora, are about something else: something deeper and less tangible, more saddening and celebratory, something all-encompassing and inescapable, like color. Harvey’s photographs waltz with an essence of what it means to be alive, to witness dying, and to continue to live,” writes art critic Sabrina Mandanici in her review of Blue Violet.