Kaikalulu Beach, Kauiku, Maui

Virginia Beahan

born 1946

Laura McPhee

born 1958

Kaikalulu Beach, Kauiku, Maui, 1996

Portfolio/Series title: No Ordinary Land

Where object was made: Maui, Hawaii, United States

Material/technique: chromogenic color print

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 76.2 x 101.6 cm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 30 x 40 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 76.2 x 101.6 cm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 30 x 40 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 41 1/4 x 48 x 1 in
Weight (Weight): 25 lbs

Credit line: Gift of the photographers

Accession number: 2000.0007

Not on display

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Images

Label texts

Exhibition Label:
"Site Specifics,” Aug-2010, Susan Earle
This photograph was taken with a large-format view camera from a bird’s eye perspective. The standing mother and baby provide a sense of scale on a shoreline that is otherwise hard to gauge how large or small it is. The work is a collaborative endeavor by photographers Viginia Beahan and Laura McPhee, who originally met in a photography class at Princeton and now both teach photography to college students. Having traveled throughout the world together, they have come to see that no part of the earth’s surface is unaltered by human activity. Their work demonstrates an understanding of both geology and culture, what they call the inextricable bind between “nature and the human hand.”

“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

Exhibition Label:
"1 December, 1999 Curatorial Meeting Show," Dec-1999, John Pultz and others
Over twenty years ago I met Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee when they were beginning photographers and fellow students in a history of photography course. In the intervening years, Virginia and Laura have developed an intense friendship and working relationship. They have traveled the world to collaborate on photographs that observe humankind's relationship to the natural environment. Working with an antique view camera, which uses 8 x 10 inch film, they take turns under the focusing cloth, commenting back and forth on content and composition.
Last summer, on an art-buying trip with me to New York, two Spencer Museum's colleagues saw and like these photographs. This convinced me that the photographs' quality and not my friendship propelled me to acquire them. I bought one for the museum; the photographers offered the second as a gift