Walk far enough along Huntingdon Avenue in Boston, Mass. and you'll find yourself in Idaho. For there, in the heart of a bustling metropolis, hanging in the Museum of Fine Arts, are 40 8-by-6-foot images of the Sawtooth Valley.
Photographer Laura McPhee made these larger-than-life-images during a two-year residency in the Sawtooth Valley. From June 2003 to September 2005, McPhee lugged her old-fashioned Deardorff viewfinder camera around the valley looking for inspiration.
The resulting work uses 19th-century techniques in the age of digital technology as it captures the essence of a land torn between the two centuries. Her images recall romantic landscape paintings in their idealization of the sublime, while simultaneously presenting the complex reality of life in the 21st century.
In this, her first major solo museum show, McPhee's photographs use the Sawtooth Valley to examine conflicting ideas about landscape and land use in America as a whole. The body of work combines idyllic panoramas full of natural beauty—such as "Fourth of July Creek Ranch, Custer County, Idaho, July 8, 2003" (2003)—with snapshots of the realities of human interaction with the natural world—such as the bloody scene in "Quartered Rocky Mountain Elk, Milky Creek, White Cloud Mountains, Idaho" (2004) and the ravages of strip mining in "Cyanide Evaporation Pool by the River of No Return Wilderness, Grouse Creek Lead, Silver and Gold Mine, Yankee Fork, Idaho" (2005).
"One of the things we wanted to do in this exhibition is play off 19th century American landscape painting and the large-scale canvases of that period, which dealt with some of the same issues," said William Stover, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts and curator of McPhee's exhibition.
So much detail on view sucks the viewer into that place, Stover said. "She is talking about the vastness of this area and the sublimity of this place, as well as some other more difficult issues. For those reasons we chose to print the photographs that large, to really make the viewer feel a part of that place," he said.
McPhee, whose father is New Yorker writer John McPhee, grew up in New Jersey and now lives in Boston. She graduated from Princeton University and went on to get her MFA at Rhode Island School of Design. Since 1986, she has been professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art. This East-Coast girl found herself in a remote corner of Idaho by way of The Alturas Foundation.
A family foundation representing four generations in the American West and dedicated to visual arts and American culture, The Alturas Foundation selected McPhee as its initial artist-in-residence, inviting her to stay in a cabin by Fourth of July Creek. McPhee arrived in June 2003 with no idea of what she would produce.
"I thought maybe I would just read and think. But once I started to become involved with the place it just was incredible, both stimulating intellectually and inspiring visually for me.
"Before I visited the Sawtooth Valley I had no idea it existed and I think now I will always have that place in my mind. In my book "No Ordinary Land" I collaborated with another woman. Everywhere we would go we would say, 'Is this your spiritual homeland?" It was sort of a running joke. I would always go 'No, no, no, no.' And then, when I got to Idaho, I thought to myself 'OK this could rate. This is my spiritual homeland.'"
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"Laura McPhee: River of No Return" will remain on view through Sept. 17 in the Foster and Rabb Galleries at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (www.mfa.org). There are no immediate plans to bring the work to Idaho, but some approaches have been made. To see more of McPhee's images and to read an in-depth interview with the artist pick up a copy of the new Sun Valley Guide magazine, on stands now.
