A giant undertaking

WOBURN -- In art, no less than in life, size matters. So William Stover is a little worried.

''Does she look too gigantic?" asks Stover, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts. ''No, no, we don't want that," Laura McPhee says. ''That's my worry, too."

What they're worried about is a portrait, taken by McPhee, of a teenage girl. The portrait is a work print, secured to the wall by a mass of blue duct tape. So much securing is required because the print is huge: 8 feet by 6 feet.

It's one of many pictures McPhee took between June 2003 and September 2005 in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains. She and Stover have culled 40 of them to make up ''Laura McPhee: River of No Return," which opens Saturday at the MFA.

McPhee, 47, teaches at Massachusetts College of Art. One of the area's most distinguished photographers, she's held Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, and her work is in the permanent collections of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

McPhee and Stover are inside a warehouse in an industrial park off of Interstate 95. Also here are Bernard Toale, whose South End gallery shows McPhee's work; Marc Elliott, whose firm, Color Services, is processing McPhee's pictures; and a goodly number of museum and technical personnel.

Although it's a bit of a crowd, there's plenty of room. The space is 5,000 square feet, with a 24-foot-high ceiling. A van parked at the far end looks as though it's been made by Tonka, not Chrysler. ''This is the biggest studio in New England," Elliott explains. ''We're renting this facility just to produce this show."

Once the final selection of prints has been made, Stanhope Framers will build a shop in the warehouse to mount the pictures. ''The less moving around the framer has to do, the better for the print," notes Toale. At this size, photographic paper can get dinged, just like a car body. And the framed photographs will weigh between 300 and 400 pounds -- not quite a Mini Metro, but getting up there.

''I never felt the need to make pictures that big before, and I hope I'll never feel the need to make them that big again!" McPhee says with a laugh. She wants viewers to get a ''sense of falling into" the picture.

The photographs, all in color, range from portraits to landscapes to scenes of daily life. There are images of natural beauty that could belong to the 19th century and images of environmental destruction that should belong to no century.

A show like McPhee's will usually take two years or more to organize, Stover says. This one is being set up in slightly less than a year, thanks to a set of happy coincidences. First there was the existence of this body of work, owing to McPhee's being selected as an artist-in-residence by the Alturas Foundation, an arts foundation with a longstanding commitment to the American West. Furthermore, Alturas would underwrite printing, framing, and other expenses for an exhibition.

Then Toale realized last spring that a collector he knew had just bought a ''beautiful huge new apartment" near his gallery. He asked if he could borrow it to, in effect, audition McPhee's Idaho project. For two weeks last May, curators from Boston and New York came to inspect the pictures and consider exhibiting them. The MFA, which had an opening this spring in its Foster and Rabb galleries for contemporary art, grabbed the show.

Deciding to do a show is not the same thing as actually doing it. Doing a show means ''gnarly decisions," as McPhee puts it. Today's order of business includes: what the opening image will be, which room which pictures will hang in, whether repetitiveness is a problem, if it makes sense to use temporary walls, the ratio of vertical images to horizontal images, how to handle signage, and whether the photo of an elk carcass is too intense to exhibit.

Eight full-size prints, or portions of prints, hang on a wall. The remaining pictures, 8-inch-by-10-inch prints, are reduced versions of the remaining images in the show. These are laid out on three long tables set up as a T. ''It helps to have a great big space like this where you can lay everything out," McPhee says. ''On my living room floor the pictures compete with the rugs."

They're working on a layout the way magazine art directors do -- except these images are meant for walls, not pages. Heads down, McPhee and Stover keep moving sideways, circling the tables, intermittently reaching out to shift the arrangement. It almost looks choreographed: a ballet of scrutiny.

Some of the decisions, such as signage, won't be final until just before the show opens. Others are more straightforward. The first image will be of a woman in a nightgown beneath a cloud-filled dawn sky. They'll need one temporary wall. The elk stays.

McPhee and Stover work well together. Still, the need to make so many decisions creates a sense of some urgency. The photographer's expressions of slightly sardonic humor make it easier to handle. McPhee has sad, quizzical eyes, but when she makes a deadpan aside they betray a slyly complicit glint.

Right now, though, McPhee's eyes are completely intent. ''This one has something," she says, pointing at a picture. ''I know it has something. I just can't say what this something is."

It's an uncharacteristic loss for words. McPhee's speech is almost as eloquent as her images. Her verbal skill comes naturally: Her father is John McPhee, the New Yorker magazine writer.

Photography is a birthright, too. ''My mother is a photographer," McPhee says, and her mother's studio, Pryde Brown Photographs, is still on Nassau Street in Princeton, N.J., where McPhee grew up.

''I just remember so distinctly being in the amber light of the darkroom, and smelling the chemicals, and bathing my hands in the chemicals, and watching the miracle of the latent image coming to life, really, on the paper."

McPhee started photographing at age 12, with a 120mm camera her mother gave her. She says she's never had a 35mm camera. For the past two decades, she's used an old-fashioned Deardorff viewfinder camera, which requires a tripod and long exposure times. It gets extraordinary detail and depth but at the expense of speed and spontaneity.

The Deardorff, McPhee says, ''is essentially a mahogany box. I love it, I love it. There are lighter cameras, but I'm committed to the object, though I have upgraded to a carbon-fiber tripod because they weigh so much less.

''In her book on Eadweard Muybridge, Rebecca Solnit writes that photography, in the 19th century, was a way of, in a sense, making space smaller and speeding time up. Working with this camera, I feel like, OK, now I can open space up and slow things back down. It's a much slower process. You're there with a dark cloth. You can't do anything fast."

McPhee was given the camera by her friend and Princeton classmate Katrina vanden Heuvel. ''I've watched her evolve as an artist," says vanden Heuvel, who's editor of The Nation magazine. ''At Princeton, she was such a portrait artist. Then she moved into landscape. She's gone from the personal to much more public spaces."

After college, McPhee spent several years traveling and working at various jobs. ''I spent four years trying to figure out what I wanted to do," she says. ''Then I decided to apply to graduate school in visual arts, and the die was cast." She got a master's from the Rhode Island School of Design and started teaching at MassArt in 1986.

McPhee has worked both solo and in collaboration with Virginia Beahan. She's photographed in Italy, Iceland, Hawaii, and Sri Lanka. If there's one constant in her career, it's recording the interaction between mankind and the environment.

The photographer Emmit Gowin was her teacher at Princeton. ''Landscape is truly Laura's subject," he says. ''There is, I think, everywhere she's gone, a sensitivity to how a thing can be beautiful and, at the same time, toxic: intriguing, inviting, yet there's a glimmer of something disturbing."

It was that dual quality that caught the eye of the Alturas Foundation. ''I was working in India," McPhee recalls (some of her Indian photos are showing at Toale's gallery through July 1). ''I told them, 'I'm a Jersey girl, I don't know about the West. I may just go there and read.' "

McPhee, who ended up going to Idaho eight times, didn't just read. ''I am deeply interested in making work that is about nature and what we do in it," she says. ''So I was glad to have the opportunity to do that again in a place like Idaho where you really see it very clearly, though in a different way from how I'd ever seen it before."

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.