Laura McPhee

The title of this image gives away its mystery, but on first encounter one imagines that Laura McPhee must have invented this mystical woman in a white nightgown, standing alone in a golden field and raising an instrument to the expansive sky. Rather, Judy is entirely real, part of a family of scientists McPhee knew and photographed. The pictured ritual is Judy’s regular morning chore-it keeps the family and animals safe from wolves, which were controversially reintroduced to the area. While the image speaks to daily life in the Sawtooth Valley and to political issues surrounding the management of the land, it also suggests that our relationship to the land could still be sacred.

McPhee studied under Emmet Gowin at Princeton University before coming to RISD to earn her MFA. Like him, she is interested in how the natural world shapes and is shaped by human behavior. She has photographed all over the world. This recent project resulted from an artist’s residency in the Sawtooth Valley of central Idaho, where she examined in a magnificent setting the stereotype of the tough individualist, as well as the current debates over land use. McPhee spent a great deal of time with the family of the woman pictured here, who was photographed while checking for wolves to see if it were safe to let her daughter and dogs go outdoors. In an exhibition brochure for a show of her work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, McPhee stated:

My interest lies in the dilemmas, and it is dilemma that I picture. While I

draw on the language of the nineteenth-century sublime, I am simultaneously

presenting twenty-first century conundrums. The images are sometimes

abstract and mystical; they are also replete with facts and arguments, though

not with answers.