Getty Museum

Foundation of a Burned House, Santa Monica Mountains, California

Date

1995

Medium

Chromogenic print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

>Our pictures examine areas as remote and newly formed as Iceland and as densely populated and industrially developed as New Jersey. Our work is about how human inventiveness has shaped the natural world, and it tries to convey the multiple possibilities for reading landscape. > >--Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee, have come to believe that no part of the earth's surface is unaltered by human activity. They began their photographic collaboration in 1987, when they traveled to Iceland to explore what McPhee described as an "apocalyptic landscape.” Beahan and McPhee photographed throughout the world with their large format camera revealing a variety of attitudes towards the natural environment. Their work demonstrates an understanding both of geology and culture, what they call the inextricable bind between "nature and the human hand." A selection from this series was published in 1998 in *No Ordinary Land: Encounters in a Changing Environment*. See also: [98.XM.200.1][1], [98.XM.200.2][2], [98.XM.200.3][3], [98.XM.200.4][4], [98.XM.200.5][5], [2003.517.1][6], [2003.517.5][7], [2008.80.2][8], [2008.80.3][9], [2008.80.4][10] [1]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/108E7N [2]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/108E7P [3]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/108E7Q [4]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/108E7R [5]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/108E7S [6]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/1096MA [7]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/1096P7 [8]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109DDM [9]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109DDN [10]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109DDP

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