Emerald Drifters

Cig Harvey author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Monacelli Press

Publishing:13th Mar '25

£39.95

This title is due to be published on 13th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Emerald Drifters cover

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.’

‘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

ISBN: 9781580936873

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 1490g

224 pages