No Ordinary Land: Encounters in a Changing Environment

For more than ten years Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee have traveled the world–from Iceland to Costa Rica, Sri Lanka to New York –exploring the ways people interact with the landscapes in which they live. 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 collision between natural and constructed worlds.

In 1987, Laura McPhee and Virginia Beahan began their photographic work together using a large-format camera.