Terri Loewenthal b. 1972

The history of landscape photography is rife with men behind cameras attempting to offer the definitive view of a particular land feature. (Think of Ansel Adams’ iconic images of Half Dome and Carleton Watkins’ famous compositions of Yosemite Valley.) This kind of image-making seeks to capture, as in “possess,”an objective version of the natural world that does not (and has never) existed. As a woman seeking to reimagine the genre of landscape photography, my work overlaps multiple vantage points and shifts colors into oversaturated hues, exposing the fallacy of a single objective view and offering a rich, sublime subjectivity in its place that is faithful to the lived complexity of human-and-land interactions. Each of my images is a single exposure, in-camera composition that utilizes special optics I developed. The result is not a “made-up” image, but rather one that reflects the truth of countless multiplicities: the human capacity for intimacy with land; our connection to a reality that is not merely factual but also arises from emotion and imagination; and our longing for wild, transformative experiences within and without the psyche.

Terri Loewenthal has exhibited at diverse venues including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, California), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, California), San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (San Jose, California) and Booth Western Art Museum (Cartersville, Georgia). Her work is included in many collections, public and private, including the City of San Francisco, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Fidelity Investments, Facebook and Instagram. She has been featured in many publications including Aperture, Harper’s and Wired. She is also founder of The Chetwood, a residency program that provides housing for artists visiting the Bay Area, allowing them to create lasting community with supportive peer networks outside of typical art-making structures. Loewenthal is a frequent collaborator with many Bay Area arts organizations including Creative Growth (Oakland, California) and has been an active musician for over a decade; her bands Call and Response, Rubies and Shock have performed extensively nationally and internationally. Terri has a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University in Houston, Texas and is originally from Washington, D.C. and South Florida.

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