Hauntingly beautiful; redefines landscape photography for me

books:

	• No Ordinary Land: Encounters in a Changing Environment Virginia Beahan, Laura McPhee Aperture, 1998 - 108 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Hauntingly beautiful; redefines landscape photography for me

The photos of this book have the technical excellence of Ansel Adams pictures (except they are not B+W). But they are not vistas of pristine, pretty National parks that Adams shot; here the hand of man is all too present.

questionning

this is the kind of book that should be mandatory in classrooms !
the world as it is...

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Breathtakingly beautiful and wondrous!

Beahan and McPhee have eloquently captured both our enmeshment with nature, and Her attempts to hold fast. Photos so beautiful you catch your breath.

Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee explore the ways people interact with the landscapes in which they live. For more than ten years they have traveled the world--from Iceland to Costa Rica, Sri Lanka to New York--uncovering in their photographs a complex weave of human attitudes, both humble and arrogant, in the face of natural elements. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her introduction, "Their images show us a world in metamorphosis, where categories melt and mutate. . . . This is a world where natural sites become shrines and shrines become works of art that represent the landscape; where stone is carved into both sculptures of bodies and homes for bodies; where water is sometimes holy water and sometimes for irrigating crops."

In Costa Rica, for example, healing waters are enshrined in frescoed concrete; in a Hawaiian garden, mangoes and oranges are protected against the cold in brown, paper bag jackets; in Iceland, children play in hot springs created by the runoff of a power plant; in Las Vegas, an artificial volcano erupts on cue. Each of Beahan and McPhee's extraordinary images captures a point of intersection where natural and constructed worlds collide. Their work creates a powerful visual map of the forces of mythology and culture at work in the landscape.

In 1987, Laura McPhee and Virginia Beahan began their photographic work together. Through the use of a large-format camera they are able to jointly participate in this unique collaboration?a process discussed with humor and warmth in John McPhee's afterword, "Laura and Virginia." They have received support for their photography from numerous sources including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Polaroid Corporation, and the Turner Foundation, Inc.

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