Cig Harvey

Cig and I spoke for the podcast in early 2021. Below is an edited version of our conversation. You can listen to the full episode here.

All photos are from Cig’s new book Blue Violet.

Montse: You're an incredible photographer and you're a writer. How would you describe to us who you are beyond that? How do you move through the world?

Cig: Thank you first of all for inviting me on here Montse and also your really kind words about my work. I appreciate it. I feel very lucky to be living this life. I think of myself as an artist who uses images and language to open discussion about the senses, what it is to live, what it is to feel. I would say that that's who I am outside of my work too and that’s how I was as a child too. In my very first memories, I remember so clearly sitting in a treehouse with blossoms falling on me, and that is an image that has stayed with me all through my adult life.

I think that that is who I am, this idea of senses, of living the everyday with eyes wide open with appreciation. I believe that optimism and beauty are powerful tools to live a life, to also foster conversation and to repair. Originally, I came into the art world through photography. It’s not just image-based now for me, it is also through language. It's just about this idea of the senses and connection.

Montse: I love that. In writing, we learn so much about the importance of bringing in the senses to your work. Of course, the sixth sense, the intuition is the one that's least talked about but I find it translates so much to your photography as well because even without you saying that in your photography, the senses are important, you can really feel that. When you're sitting down to write or out taking a photo, is it the same inner process? Are you thinking about those senses in both ways?

Cig: Yes. I'm not necessarily intellectually thinking about the senses, and my process is really from the gut. We feel senses all over the body, but each sense typically is assigned to a region, the skin, or ears, eyes, tongue, taste whereas intuition comes from this place in the gut that's very hard to describe. What is intuition? I do believe that art-making, photography perhaps in particular but also writing when you get out of the way of yourself, and you just write, and you don't let the critic come in, you just go out with your camera and respond to the world, you make work from the gut in both of those situations.

Then it's a matter of coming back and saying, "Okay, now, I'm rereading it, what is interesting here out of the stream of conscious that I wrote this morning or just looking at my contact sheets?" and then noticing what you've been noticing. Taking that and then analyzing that further to then push the work to a place that feels united and cohesive.

Montse: I love that. By the way, I just love so much the concept of the date night with your photography, pictures. It makes me think it really, truly is a romance.

Cig: It is. I love that. It's exactly that, and I literally do it. It's not a date night with a screen. I print them and I pin them on the wall, and I sit in front of them and listen to them. It's really just slowing everything down, isn't it, and just taking a minute and absorbing — notice what you’ve been noticing. It's the same with writing. I never set out to write a piece about something.

The only thing that I set out each day - and I fail at it sometimes - but I try and do it each day is I try and make a notation of what stopped me in my tracks today. Maybe it was a red leaf, maybe it was a piece of light and it can just be a list. It doesn't have to be this long piece of writing but just something. What did you notice today? Maybe it's the way that I noticed this morning the way I brought all these roses inside and put them up in our bedroom. I noticed that beforehand, the windows used to fog and now they don't fog at night. I was thinking of roses breathing on the window.

I'll take that to when I want to sit down and start writing, These are the things that I noticed over the last week or so, or today, or the last month and then I'll write to that idea after or I'll make-- It's the same with the camera. The camera is just an expensive pencil. It's noticing and making a picture of the frost on the window or the way a bird is leaving or a piece of light on a red sofa. It's the same thing, it's like, what did you see today or what did you either write about or see that you thought was worthy of further thought?

Montse: I want to talk to you about the description for your book, You Look at Me Like an Emergency. "You Look at Me Like an Emergency takes the viewer on a literal and metaphorical journey that deals with rejection, hope, strength, loss and love to finally find a place called home.” Each of those words in there holds so much. I wanted to ask you first of all, what is home to you?

Cig: Home has been a central theme in my work. It was something I think I was searching for like many of us for many years. I think as an artist, I don't know but I think that home is so important for so many of us so that when we're grounded, when we feel secure, we have this base that then we can live in our heads and have these wild and crazy thoughts and make things, but we have this space. I know that when I didn't have a home, it was hard for me to make work. There's this grounding. For me having this home and this space, it really is this fundamental stake in the ground for my work. Then it allows me to start thinking about the senses and what it is to live because I have this stable base. Home has always been this literally grounding theme in all the work that I’ve done over the last 20, 25 years.

Montse: Circling back of that sentence in the description, the words rejection and hope in that sentence, they sit next to each other. It made me want to ask you what has hope looked like to you in the face of rejection?

Cig: I was born an optimist, so I do feel that for me, hope has always looked like making something. I think of photography as this place where you can pour in all your fears and all your rejections and all your hurts, and all the things you don't understand, and then it comes out in the form of hope. It comes out in this photograph, in this 2D piece of paper you can hold where somehow, all of your concerns are put into it. Whether it's a photograph of a river, whether it's a documentary photograph of some group that you've been obsessed by and wanted to document.

I think that regardless of genre in photography, I do think of a photograph as an act of hope. That it's either something that needs to be appreciated or it's something that needs to change. That in itself, which is-- that's a Cartier-Bresson line, that in itself is an act of hope. For me, making work is an act of hope.

Montse: That really brought tears to my eyes actually just thinking about that.

Cig: I've never said that that way before. It's true, I do believe that because I think that shit things happen constantly to all of us, that is part of living, that's part of life but it's how we deal with it. If you can make something or if you can write something that brings beauty into the world or brings understanding, which in itself is beauty, then that's a wonderful way to live.

Montse: For artists, I think it's so easy to - if somebody doesn't like what you're doing, to just shut down and be like, "Okay well, maybe I shouldn't do this," but what I love about everything you're saying, and your work, is that you seem to be concerned less about what other people think, and it's more about just making because you need to make. Like you were saying about your writing before that you weren't even thinking about it for public consumption, it was just for you. I love this notion of taking all of that pain and pouring it back into your art and regardless of where your art lives, it's just the creating.

Cig: Yes. I think if you listen to the critics or you listen to that analytical side of your brain, the left outside, that's always judging and not good enough, whatever, then you'll never make anything. I really feel like part of your job as an artist is just to make work. It's not to watch to see who likes it. Obviously, we all love it once the work is received well and there are accolades and that of course, and I love that too but it can't be the reason to make it. You can't appeal to everyone.

That would be impossible, and it would be a terrible world if we all had one taste. I think just coming back to I think of my job, the only thing I have to do today is look after my family and make some work. It's a 9 to 5 just little bit by little bit, everything builds each day and you make something at the end of a life, and that's what's important. It's almost a stamp of saying, listen, I was here, I lived, and this is how I lived. You think using the work as a notation on that, so not focusing too much on how it's received.

Montse: When you're a hard day or a month or a year, what has been in your personal toolkit to help you to move through it?

Cig: I have such a basic simple answer. When I'm having just not feeling inspired or just struggling, searching, so I gave myself a very limited budget that perhaps it's grown a little more over the years, but initially, it was like $10, and I go to a vintage store, thrift stores or Goodwill, and I just let myself be drawn to something.

It could be a color, it can be an object that just has, feels like it has history. Then I have to make a picture with it that day. It's got these hard parameters around it, and oftentimes that will jolt me out of a slump. I become very obsessive. I do think of photography and writing, really art as an expression of obsession. What are you obsessed with? That, to me, really helps. I become obsessed with certain colors or certain objects or certain materials, and that really helps unlock times that I get stuck.

Another thing I do is this gratitude journal that sounds so hokey, but it's just writing down, what did you see today? What stopped me? Even if it was a rough day, not the best day, whatever, there's normally something that I saw that day. It's really, it's nothing, it's just a regular Tuesday, there's something amazing happening in terms of life moments, but just the way the light falls or a certain stare or a gesture, or just some notation of what I saw, that really helps. Writing really helps unstick me when I'm stuck in photography.

These are a few of my favorite things…

Book: Just off the top of my head, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. This year, Obit. Favorite book I love, Bluets by Maggie Nelson. The Sellout, I really, really loved. I thought that was extraordinarily written. What are books that changed my life? I loved Middlesex. The God of Small Things I thought was extraordinary.

Album or Song: In writing this last book, Blue Violet, I did this playlist. I became obsessed around certain women. I put together this list and they all had to have something to do with flowers in a way, because the work is of flowers, but it's not about flowers. It's about living and dying, being, what it is to be human.

It was so fun to do it, to put together. It had to have flowers or botanicals or fruits or something like that. It spans a lot of eras in the sense that there's Dolly Parton Wildflowers, which is such a great song, and then it was Beyoncé's Lemonade. That whole album is fantastic. What else is in it? PJ Harvey, The Last Living Rose. Sia, Alive. I do have a deep love of pop music. I definitely gravitate towards female artists in both my writing and in listening too.

Jennifer McClure

Rania Matar