Silence So Deep It Rings

A powerfully evocative photographic chronicle of the high desert of the American West

Spanning almost all of Nevada and Utah and portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming, the sparsely populated regions of the Great Basin and the Basin and Range Province have stories to tell—stories intimate and vast, familial, historical, and geological. In Silence So Deep It Rings, renowned landscape photographer Laura McPhee challenges the tradition of nineteenth-century survey photography, capturing the sheer beauty and depth of the West while conveying what has since occurred on the surface of the land.

Using a large-format Deardorff camera, McPhee explores how people live in a fragile ecosystem within a changing climate, recording the many transformations occurring across both human and geological time. She looks at evidence of Indigenous peoples, at byproducts of settlers’ empire building and resource extraction—at a marred environment, perceiving time itself, from the generational embrace of family to the enormity of billions of years. McPhee documents her own existence in rural Idaho, registering the disturbing fact that our politics, practices, and collective complacency have taken us to the edge of what is ecologically sustainable.

With perspectives on the American West by John McPhee, who documented his exploration of the region decades earlier, and an in-depth interview with Laura and her father by Ian Frazier, Silence So Deep It Rings offers a profound and moving reflection on the ways human endeavor intersects with the miracle of the natural world.