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MOMENTS IN BETWEEN
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For Gail Harvey the beauty of the picture is to be found in unveiling a certain mystery, and in the shock of finding the fantastic in the normal, where tragedy is mixed with comedy. The moments in between. Her photos excited feelings for infinite complexities and an imaginative appreciation of reality.
They are poetic, and are astonishing for being extracted directly from life. Her photos from the MOMENTS IN BETWEEN series are “found” in the street, in poetical juxtapositions that occur in the movement of everyday life.
“To feel what you frame through the viewfinder requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart in the same moment,” says Harvey. She approaches photography with a voracious appetite for the usual and unusual, and her street photography contains a wealth of unpredictable meanings.
- Jane Corkin Gallery
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Here is an instinctual photographer. Instead of using elaborate props to concoct that which may lie beneath the surface of things, she seems to believe that clues to behaviour, or personality, come through by recording the subject as is. And although some of her pieces bring to mind Andre Kertesz or Diane Arbus’s stark, sometimes cruel realism, Harvey’s manner is tamer. She shoots with a gentle edge. For most of us, age exhibits character and the faces of the elderly which peer into Harvey’s lens, like the 83-year-old Italian woman gazing at us with a regal exuberant defiance from her New York doorstep or the two women caught in the lobby of Toronto’s Winchester hotel, are moving examples of how we try to cheat time. Being ordinary and therefore often overlooked by the casual observer, subjects such as these are all the more startling when frozen in a frame. They connect, inviting us to look upon ourselves.
- John Fitzgerald, Art Critic
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Gail Harvey, whose has had six exhibits at the Jane Corkin gallery is best known for her portraits of movie stars, but also takes meaningful pictures or ordinary folk going about their ordinary business. Her debt to Diane Arbus is as obvious as her fondness for photo-journalism. When she isn’t travelling the world snapping real life, she can be found on a movie set.
- Christopher Hume, Art Critic
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