Laura McPhee: River of No Return

Quartered Rocky Mountain Elk, Milky Creek, White Cloud Mountains, Idaho, 2004
© Laura McPhee

It’s easy to find yourself delightfully lost in the vastness of many of Laura McPhee’s forty large-scale (6’ x 8’) color photographs currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. During her two-year stay as an artist-in-residence with The Alturas Foundation, McPhee concentrated on photographing the landscape and agrarian life, directly addressing these ideas about land use and, in essence, human values in relationship to the natural world. Named after the body of water that runs through the remote wilderness area of Sawtooth Valley in central Idaho, River of No Return hopes to discuss the valley’s function as “a microcosm of America and the dilemmas that communities and people nationwide face when dealing with land issues.” When McPhee succeeds, and she often does, she allows us a glorious and intimate gaze at the vulnerability of the land.

Along with photographs of the landscape, the exhibition also features several full body portraits of a young girl by the name of Mattie, the striking “female protagonist, replacing the cowboy character in the traditional representation of the Midwest,” as William Stover, assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the MFA, put it. To some, Mattie may be a symbolic figure within the exhibition. Stover discussed McPhee’s intensions, the story behind the work, as well as the images themselves as he gave a tour of the gallery space. Whether this much is true (or not), Mattie certainly becomes the human face to the landscape, with her beautiful chiseled features and her strong and intent eyes.

In addition to witnessing natural beauty in the land, for example: Fourth of July Creek Ranch, Custer County, Idaho, July 8, 2003 (2003), viewers are also shown some of the realities of human interaction with the land, such as the blood-spattered scene in Quartered Rocky Mountain Elk, Milky Creek, White Cloud Mountains, Idaho (2004). Though one could argue that McPhee may be beautifying or even romanticizing her images by applying formalist poetics to her 19th-century large format process (producing lush, large, and aesthetically attractive photographs), I believe she intriguingly and fairly elegantly juxtaposes the typical American West with such imagery as new construction, strip mining, forest fires, hunted animals, and cyanide pools. McPhee shows us an American West, which is at first rather beautiful on the surface, but some time with the body of work quickly uncovers the actuality – a wilderness caught in tension with its human inhabitants.