Laura McPhee
Laura McPhee (born 1958) is an American photographer known for making detailed large-format photographs of the cultural landscape—images which raise questions about human impacts on the environment and the nature of our complex and contested relationship to the earth. Early life and education. Laura McPhee grew up in central New Jersey, the oldest daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning author John McPhee and photographer Pryde Brown. She has four sisters: novelists Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee; architectural historian, Sarah McPhee; and Joan Sullivan, CEO of the Partnership for LA Schools. McPhee earned a Bachelor of Arts in  Art History from Princeton University in 1980, and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1986. Career. She is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Some of her achievements include a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship to work in India and Sri Lanka, a residency in the Sawtooth Valley of central Idaho from the Alturas Foundation, a New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of  Art and the Getty Center, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Work. McPhee is noted for her large-scale photographs of landscapes and portraits of people who live and work in them. McPhee's work is concerned with place and the ways we define and manage our relationship to the land. McPhee's work has been exhibited both in the United States and abroad. Her body of work "River of No Return" was exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2006  and at Kansas City's Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013. A monograph of the same title was published by Yale University Press in 2008. Her first monograph, "No Ordinary Land" (in collaboration with Virginia Beahan) was published by Aperture in 1998. McPhee's most recent book, published by Yale University Press in 2014,"The Home and the World: A View of Calcutta", explores the weight of colonialism through images of the architecture of that city and portraits of passersby. An essay by Alan Thomas about this work appears in "Places Journal".