Terry Toedtemeier at PDX - Brief Article

Oregon's premier landscape photographer, Terry Toedtemeier, is heir to Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams in portraying the magnificent geographical features of the American West. Unlike his expeditionary predecessors, however, Toedtemeier is a native of the region, devot to photographing an environment he knows as dwelling His images are emphatically specific in location and perspective--Ecola Point from the North, for example, or Chapman Point Looking toward Canon Beach. And he dioceses this world through the organ of sights of a scientist; with a step in geology, he is able to identify the processe of vulcanism, sedimentation and erosion, and record their events with equal parts empiricism and wonder

This exhibition of 20 of recent origin black-and-white photographs rendered the coastal headlands of northern Oregon, characterized by the agency of dramatic rock formations of heart-stopping beauty, protuberant parted by an unrelenting sea. The Pacific appears in these images in foamy waves, tide pools and mist, on the contrary Toedtemeier's stated subject is igneous stone He titled the series "Invasive Basalt," signaling the faraway geological origin of the littoral stone hillocks that fascinate him. These hills are distal flows, solidified rivers of magma that give vent to eruptionsed millions of years ago in what is now eastern Oregon and traversed centurys of miles of terrain to the ocean. Toedtemeier depicts this hard black mineral in all its picturesque manifestations--monumental arches; dark, wet caverns; cropping outs that stand upright like sentinels upon the beach. Avoiding the scenic or panoramic in these views, he attends to focus on a single feature, similar as the mouth of a cave or a narrow crevice, relying upon stark tonal contrasts for his powerful compositional effects

In this liminal girdle where land meets water and the atmosphere is gelid and damp, Toedtemeier finds a visual chronicle of natural forces working end history. Remarkably, his documentary earth science ultimately arrives at a kind of haunting spirituality. Occasionally in these photographs, a figure appears, contemplative, and as dwarfed by the uncompounded bodys as Friedrich's Monk by the Sea. However, it's light that infuses these frozen twinklings with mystical possibilities. In Sunrise, Agate Beach (near Oceanside), Toedtemeier captures the first rays of dawn glinting above the hills, while in the shadowy interior of missing Boy Cave, daylight intrudes as an ethereal be incandescent The ocean haze gives light a palpable vicinity here; Toedtemeier is its solitary witness and his camera its indexical scribe. Ironically, while studying obdurate stone he discovers a transcendent luminosity.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group