Cig Harvey British, b. 1973

Kale, at night, filling the frame from edge to edge. The leaves are enormous and savoyed, curled at the rims, packed one over another until there is no ground, no sky and nothing to say how big any of it is. Water stands on every surface in hundreds of separate beads. Toward the top right a single pale stem rises upright through the mass, the one vertical in a picture that otherwise pours downward. Past the leaves at the edges, the dark closes completely.

Photographed like this, a vegetable bed stops being a vegetable bed. Flash at night removes the world around a thing and leaves the thing looking like evidence. This is the lighting of the specimen plate and the field guide, the register in which unfamiliar organisms get recorded for the first time, and it has been turned on a crop anybody can buy in February. Nothing whatever has been invented. The strangeness is entirely a question of where the light came from.

The droplets do the rest. Each one holds a small bright point, which is the flash arriving back, so the picture contains several hundred tiny photographs of its own light source. They are not falling. They sit there, held by the wax on the leaf, declining to be dew and declining to be rain. Harvey has found the one hour when a kitchen garden looks like something brought back from somewhere else, and she did it without touching a single leaf.