You an Orchestra You a Bomb

You an Orchestra You a Bomb is Cig Harvey's third monograph. She made these color photographs after a personal accident left her newly alert to how briefly anything lasts.

Schilt Publishing released the book in 2017. It pairs Harvey's large-format color images, domestic interiors, flowers, self-portraits, scenes from her rural life in Maine, with her own short poems and prose. The pictures work in the register Harvey has built across her career. She applies heightened, saturated color to ordinary rooms and objects until they read as charged or momentarily strange, drawing on a private set of subjects she returns to rather than a documentary world outside herself.

Harvey is a British-born photographer based in Maine. This book followed the widely noticed You Look at Me Like an Emergency (2012) and Gardening at Night (2015), continuing her long-running project on attention, domestic life, and sensory experience. Later titles, including Blue Violet and Emerald Drifters, extend the same project into further color studies.