Laura McPhee
Born 1958, New York, NY, lives and works in Brookline, MA
15th-Century Terracotta Temple, Attpur, West Bengal, 1998, color coupler print, Museum Purchase, 2003.57
Laura McPhee’s photograph was purchased from The 2003 DeCordova Annual Exhibition, from a series of interior and exterior landscapes of India. The artist traveled to Calcutta in 1998 to make photographs in India “…because East and West are so profoundly intertwined there that the landscape and architecture speak to the manner in which cultures cross one another…I am compelled by the particulars of place, whether inside or out, and by the way in which a photograph can reveal the web of religion, politics, and history in quotidian life.” By choosing sites that are neglected and overlooked, McPhee shows the beauty that exists in the deterioration of architecture and time and nature’s effects on these places. This is no more apparent than in 15th-Century Terracotta Temple, Attpur, West Bengal, in which a banyan tree grows from an old temple.
