Rather than an attempt to possess or own the land as territory in her work, Loewenthal’s gaze is symbiotic, evoking synergy with the landscape – such as in the body of work she has dedicated recent years to making, photographs made in the Bay Area mountain, Mount Tamalpais. In the spring of 2025, some of that work will be exhibited at the Bolinas Museum “which is nestled in that very landscape”.

Loewenthal’s champion for The Wick is curator and art historian, Kathleen Fox-Davies. She said: “Terri Loewenthal’s photographic works transport the viewer to a re-imagined Great American West, where the landscape is infused with surreal beauty, saturated colour, and spiritual depth. Rejecting digital photographic techniques and digital manipulation, Loewenthal instead creates her visionary scenes in-camera, capturing each image with a single, unaltered shot. Her approach reinterprets the traditionally masculine lens of western landscape photography, offering a feminine perspective within her compositions that is intimate, mediative, and deeply connected to the nature.”

“Through her lens, the vast open spaces of the American West become a canvas for environmental and spiritual themes, exploring our place in the natural world. Loewnthal’s work is a visual journey – a powerful invitation to reflect on the land, its mysteries, and our relationship to it – seen through the eyes of a female artist who rather than merely observing her natural subject, she becomes one with it. The world created by Terri Loewenthal is one where the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual dissolve, and we are left to contemplate a world of wonder that is both familiar and strange.”

Loewenthal considers the landscape a raw material for composition, not a subject, shifting the dynamic and interaction between the camera and the world. “I start with something that we’ve already filed away and aim to reconfigure it in a way that helps us move beyond simply considering it beautiful again.”

Each of her images is achieved, astonishingly, via single exposure; the layers and colours we see are what happens within the camera. This is how the artist introduces a painterly quality. “My process involves composing reflections of the 360-degree landscape surrounding me and using my homemade optics to shift colors. I like to think of the work as in-camera collage: I have a toolkit and a sense of what might happen, but at the same time, it’s a process of discovery. I love the idea of making an “impossible” image.”

In a world heavily saturated with visual information, Loewenthal’s compositions encourage slow looking, and reinstate a feeling of wonder and awe at our surroundings.