Her picture of the “Door to Hell,” a giant, molten hole in Darvaza, Turkmenistan, is both dazzling and disturbing. Geologists drilling in the Turkmen desert allegedly created the fiery crater in 1971 when the ground beneath their machine collapsed. Engineers set it ablaze to stop the release of poisonous gas. The fire they thought would quickly exhaust itself has been burning ever since. Ghostly shots taken in the necropolis Koshkar-Ata, Kazakhstan, depict migrant workers, their faces covered to protect them from the sun’s glare, crafting mausoleums for the oil-rich departed in crypts once reserved for local saints.

Later, Dewe Mathews trained her camera on water, uranium, salt, and rock to uncover other untold stories. Her photographs vividly speak to the complex relationship the residents have with their environment, depicting the sacred peak and popular pilgrim destination Besh Barmag, in Azerbaijan; a dramatic canyon in Balkanabat, Turkmenistan, once covered by the Caspian Sea; a hot spring in Ramsar, Iran, whose surrounding walls were built with local, uranium-rich stone; and a series of shots tracing life along the Volga, the longest river in Europe, which flows through Russia and empties into the Caspian Sea.

“Dewe Mathews’ luminous photographs offer views of people and lands that are striking, even startling,” writes Jeffrey Quilter, the museum’s William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director, in the book’s preface. “They are at once celebratory of the human spirit and despairing in their stark record of what we humans do to ourselves and to our world. They are beautiful and terrifying and always enthralling.”

For the Harvard show Dewe Mathews played with perspective and scale. Enlarged images from the book line the gallery’s walls, offering viewers a visceral connection to her underlying themes of rock, water, and oil. “There’s narrative, there’s focus on these specific stories,” said Dewe Mathews of the framed images in the exhibition, “but there’s also a moment to indulge in the beauty of these materials themselves through these large murals.”

For Dewe Mathews, the show’s opening has added resonance because it arrives so soon after Earth Day. Like countless others, the artist said, she is deeply concerned for the planet’s future.

“Many of the pieces do show this kind of almost scarred landscape or the human hand on the landscape, and I think that that’s really important to reflect on,” she said. “I think what art and photography can do really well is pose questions and open up a slightly more subtle debate — and I would hope that is what these photographs do.”

The exhibit at the Peabody will remain on view through Feb. 17, 2020.

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