The Blue Lagoon, Svartsengi Geothermal Hot Water Pumping Station, Thorbjörn, Iceland

Laura McPhee and Virginia Beahan, who met in a
photography class at Princeton, began their artistic collaboration with a trip
to Iceland in 1987, a destination McPhee had visited the previous year with her
father, writer John McPhee. Over the next decade, McPhee and Beahan traveled
the world photographing the evidence of humankind’s complex interventions in
the natural landscape. Although this image might seem to be one of recreation
in the dangerous effluent of a power plant, this warm-water lake is actually
the clean byproduct of tapping geothermal energy, which accounts for more than
a quarter of Iceland’s electricity production.