When Photography Meets the Impressionists: Cig Harvey's Luminous Vision at Alon Zakaim
There's something magical happening in a Mayfair gallery right now. At Alon Zakaim, photographer Cig Harvey's work hangs alongside paintings by Manet, Chagall, and Pissarro—and the remarkable thing is, you can barely tell where one medium ends and the other begins.
Curated by photography expert Brandei Estes, the exhibition "I Want You to Remember This Forever" does something unexpected: it reveals how much Harvey's photographs have in common with the Impressionists' obsessions. Both chase the same fleeting moments. Both return again and again to ordinary scenes, searching for ways to see them fresh.
Watch our full chat with Cig Harvey.
Finding Magic in the Everyday
Harvey's approach mirrors the Impressionists' devotion to their immediate surroundings. Most of the photographs in the show were made within a five-mile radius of her house. One striking image of flowers on a compost heap—so composed it looks constructed—is actually a found scene at a local dahlia farm she's been photographing for years.
"How can we live with eyes wide open in the places that we spend every day?" Harvey asks. It's a question the Impressionists asked themselves constantly, painting the same haystacks and water lilies over and over, watching how light transformed the familiar.
Her photograph of a gold-dusted road captures this perfectly. Maple pollen had fallen one morning, creating an ephemeral golden carpet. Harvey saw it while taking her daughter Scout to school, pulled over, stood on the roof of her car, and made a few frames in the five minutes before it vanished. "I love that nothing is ever the same," she reflects. "You can't take it for granted."
The Camera as a New Way of Seeing
Harvey has been pushing her practice in unexpected directions. About five years ago, she started photographing at night, partly prompted by needing reading glasses for the first time. The camera, she discovered, could see things her eyes couldn't—even with perfect vision.
"Lunar Eclipse and Wild Phlox," a luminous nighttime photograph of flowers in her garden, exemplifies this approach. The camera becomes what Harvey calls "a youthful eye," revealing hidden magic in familiar scenes. It's this quality—light sources you can't quite place, everyday moments rendered otherworldly—that makes viewers gasp.
And that gasp is exactly what Harvey is after.
Words and Images, Inseparable
While Harvey firmly identifies as a photographer, she's equally committed to writing. All five of her monographs combine text and image, with each book incorporating more words than the last. She collects fragments the way she collects photographs: overheard conversations, half-remembered smells, the quality of light at 6 a.m.
"One doesn't illustrate the other," she explains, "but they both come together to hopefully add up to more than the sum of their parts." The two practices work from the same impulse—to say "notice this, appreciate this" about moments that might otherwise slip past unnoticed.
Dissolving Hierarchies
Standing in the gallery, something profound happens. The rigid categories we've constructed around artistic practice—photography, painting, sculpture—start to feel arbitrary. The paintings read as photographic. Harvey's photographs possess an unmistakable painterly quality. The hierarchy between them dissolves completely.
It's a revelation Harvey herself seems moved by. "I would never have had the bravery to even suggest this combination," she admits, crediting curator Brandei Ester with the vision. Walking into her own opening, she nearly fell to her knees, overwhelmed by how well the work converses across centuries and mediums.
The show celebrates what the Impressionists and Harvey share: a devotion to beauty, harmony, and the extraordinary potential hiding in ordinary moments. It's about learning to see the same things differently, again and again, with fresh eyes.
"I Want You to Remember This Forever" runs through November 21st at Alon Zakaim, just off Cork Street in London. Don't miss it.