Photographer and writer Cig Harvey’s new work is a poetic, richly saturated exploration of life through pigment
Following her celebrated monograph Blue Violet (Monacelli, 2021), photographer Cig Harvey continues her personal study of sensory experience, focusing on the ephemeral nature of light, pigment, and vision. Her latest photographs are lush tableaux of her signature subjects – flora, cakes, domestic interiors, and the human figure in landscape – accompanied by prose vignettes on the science and art of color, written in her vibrant, intimate style. Featuring an afterword by award-winning novelist and poet Ocean Vuong, Emerald Drifters is a catalogue of pleasures and heartbreaks, and ‘an urgent call to live.’
Review
‘[A] rallying cry to exist in our bodies.’ – Virginia The New Yorker
‘This poetic and intimate volume catalogues transient pleasures and heartbreaks. Here, audiences are reminded of what it means to embrace being alive.’ – Aesthetica Magazine
‘Emerald Drifters fills me with awe and envy. Cig Harvey is not only an extraordinary imagemaker but a terrific writer. I turn each page filled with wonder and gratitude for the beauty and tenderness of her photographs; the empathetic and resonant observational powers of her words.’– Mark Alice Durant, Publisher, Saint Lucy Books
‘The way Cig thinks and writes and makes photos all about color and light and art and life, wrapped up in this delicious package… I can’t get enough. It reminds me why I love photography, why I ache for midcoast Maine, why being a mother is extraordinary, that light and beauty is everywhere and that friends who inspire you are the greatest gift.’ – Morrigan McCarthy, Managing Photo Editor, The Wall Street Journal
'Emerald Drifters is so beautiful. I’ve always wondered what synesthesia felt like, and I imagine it would be a bit like waking up inside one of the photographs in this book.' – Stella Bugbee, Styles Editor, The New York Times
' . . . this work marks a grander, bolder departure, and comes together in perhaps my favorite of her books thus far . . . it’s a work of epistemology punctuated by essays that weave between lyrical, profound, diaristic, and edifying treatises on color and perception, retroactively changing how the images stain the mind as the pages turn, making the book’s “bookness” indispensable to how the images are perceived.' – Ocean Vuong, bestselling author
About the Author
Cig Harvey is a British-born, Maine-based artist who uses images and language to celebrate the beauty in the everyday. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal. This is her fifth monograph.
Ocean Vuong is a writer, professor, and photographer. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling poetry collection Time Is a Mother, and the American Book Award-winning novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
