"We have been photographing landscape in collaboration since 1987. 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.

It has become our view that no part of the earth's surface is unaltered by human activity. We have come to see landscape as a peculiarly human construct, created as much in the mind of the viewer as in reality. For us it is the combination of the imaginative and unpredicted with the facts of places and objects that draw us to certain locations: The tracks of farm vehicles turned white with petals, green fishing net spread over the land to stop erosion, a canoe hidden among the exposed tufa formations of a lake drained to supply drinking water to Los Angeles. Nature and the human hand, historic and geologic time, are inextricably bound."

--Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee

Virginia Beahan earned her M.F.A. in photography from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She has taught photography at Harvard University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tyler School of Art, and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She currently lives in Lyme Center, New Hampshire.

Laura McPhee attended Princeton University and the Rhode Island School of Design, earning a B.A. in art history and an M.F.A. in photography, respectively. She was a visiting professor at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1988 and currently teaches photography at the Massachusetts College of Art. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

A portfolio of their work was published in the Summer 1997 issue of Orion. To order a copy of this issue, please visit The Orion Society Marketplace, call (413) 528-4422, write The Orion Society, 195 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230, or e-mail us at orion@orionsociety.org.

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