{"id":15101,"date":"2020-01-29T07:24:29","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T12:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=15101"},"modified":"2020-01-29T07:24:29","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T12:24:29","slug":"laura-mcphee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2020\/01\/29\/laura-mcphee\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beautiful Desolation Of Photographer Laura McPhee\u2019s \u2018Desert Chronicle\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cLaura McPhee: Desert Chronicle\u201d\u2014on view at Boston\u2019s Carroll and Sons<\/a> gallery from Dec. 4, 2019, to Feb. 1, 2020\u2014is a concise exhibition of five large photos from the Brookline artist\u2019s latest, ongoing project.<\/p>\n

The pictures here include images of distant hillsides of trees that read like slashing lines; the whoosh of water blurred smooth white by a long shutter exposure as it rushes through a bony black lava flow; lightning crackling out of a blue-black night to touch down in mountains and scrubby desert. They are cool, sumptuous color photos of landscapes so stark they seem like black and white.<\/p>\n

Over the years, McPhee\u2019s lush, large color landscape photos have ranged from storefronts, palace exteriors, colonial interiors and street vendors of Calcutta, India, to new growth sprouting at the feet of the charred trunks left by a forest fire that raged through the White Cloud Mountains of central Idaho. Her 2006 \u201cRiver of No Return\u201d exhibition at Boston\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts used her large-format view camera to describe a valley in Idaho\u2014split rail fences zigzagging across a valley floor, a bloody carcass being rendered among snowy birches, a camouflaged hunter crouched in the brush beside a stream, plus a sprinkling of fashion-pretty portraits of a young woman.<\/p>\n

\"Laura<\/a>
Laura McPhee, “Lightning Over Joe Jump Basin, Custer County, Idaho,” 2017. (Courtesy Carroll and Sons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

McPhee \u201cis currently working in the desert west of the United States,\u201d according to her website, \u201cwhere she is chronicling visual stories about time, both geologic and human.\u201d McPhee, who is presently chair of the photography department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, often seems to be roaming a mythological American West of vast empty landscapes with scars from human extractive use creeping in at the edges.<\/p>\n

“Desert Chronicle” is a working title for photographs that grew out of her \u201cRiver of No Return\u201d and \u201cGuardians of Solitude\u201d series. \u201cInitially, Laura was retracing the path of her pioneer grandmother, but the project has grown beyond those known locations,\u201d according to the gallery.<\/p>\n

\"Laura<\/a>
Laura McPhee, “Big Wood River Crossing A Lava Flow, Lincoln County, Idaho,” 2017. (Courtesy Carroll and Sons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Other \u201cDesert Chronicle\u201d photos have depicted a strip mine, the parched bottom of a dam, a slivery river winding through bluffs, fog and what looks like a storm rolling over desert buttes. They are photos about the ways of water, about landscapes vast and empty of people but littered with their remains: dirt roads, worn fences, exhausted houses, lonely grain elevators, abandoned gas stations, junk yards of rusting mid-20th century cars.<\/p>\n

\u201cMade with film and a large-format view camera, the photographs envelop time, both geologic and human,\u201d McPhee writes on her website<\/a>. \u201cA serpentine river has cut deep meanders through the land. A gold mine on the edge of the Black Rock Desert is an incision in the land, exposing its ruddy interior. A still-life found on slickrock in the Navajo Nation reveals fragments of human presence\u2014machine parts, zippers, desert- varnished tin cans, a tiny plastic toy among shards of glass and rust. Collectively, the pictures evoke contemplation of how we use the earth and to what ends. A meditation on our material lives and the unintended consequences of humanity’s attempts to control and manage nature, the images depict our paradoxical efforts as we variously restore, protect, alter, and exploit the land.\u201d<\/p>\n

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If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"Laura<\/a>
Laura McPhee, “Above Warm Springs Creek, Blane County Idaho,” 2015. (Courtesy Carroll and Sons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cLaura McPhee: Desert Chronicle\u201d\u2014on view at Boston\u2019s Carroll and Sons gallery from Dec. 4, 2019, to Feb. 1, 2020\u2014is a concise exhibition of five large photos from the Brookline artist\u2019s latest, ongoing project. The pictures here include images of distant hillsides of trees that read like slashing lines; the whoosh of water blurred smooth white […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15107,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[37,220,688,687,325,29,176],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15101"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15101"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15111,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15101\/revisions\/15111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}