«A girl clutching a birdhouse on an evening lit by fireflies; another with a rhubarb leaf on her head; a woman clinging to a buoy in a flat blue sea: welcome to the weird, almost René Magritte-like inner world of the US-based photographer Cig Harvey.
You Look at Me Like an Emergency is a visual autobiography in which her brightly coloured, appealingly composed but slightly off-kilter photographs are accompanied by snatches of journal jottings. She regularly poses in her own work, but her subjects are often photographed from behind, or with their faces obscured.»
«…I moved away from being in front of the lens about seven years ago, I’ve only made a couple of self portraits since then. The work before that was about the past and I chose to tell those stories through metaphor and symbol in a constructed way with myself as the subject. But the pictures were never really about me, which is why I hid my face. The story is very universal, a quest for personal identity and home. I have always been interested in what is timeless and universal in a portrait. In 2005 I started making work about the present and no longer needed to reconstruct, just have my camera present.»
Comments are closed.