No Ordinary Land

Book excerpt: 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.