Nearly all the time, Terry Toedtemeier’s photographs involved basalt, in one form or another. But once in a while he found himself in a land bereft of that igneous rock. In recent years, that happened when he went to Mount Desert Island in Maine and, in 2005, on a road trip to the Southwest—Chaco Canyon, The Lightning Field, Taos and less glamorous locations like Tuba City and Winnemucca. Terry never developed most of the film he exposed on those trips, so the new images in this exhibition are ones he never saw once his eye left his viewfinder. Thus, these prints exist in a place outside his main body of work. But they are evidence of his ongoing aesthetic sensitivity to singular forms and the phenomena of light and land, and of the joy and humor his photographs so frequently evoke.
Also on view will be a few iconic Toedtemeier prints of Eastern Oregon.
Terry Toedtemeier was a much beloved and influential Portland photographer and Curator of Photography at the Portland Art Museum from 1985 to 2009. He is the co-author of "Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957." Toedtemeier will have an exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in 2013.
