Terri Loewenthal: Havasu Falls

"My work draws upon the history of landscape photography, reimagining the genre in a psychedelic light. Each image is a single-exposure, in-camera composition that utilizes special optics I developed to compress vast spaces into complex, evocative environments. My technique shifts colors into oversaturated hues and overlaps multiple vantage points, offering the viewer a revelatory experience of the landscape. I’ve always been envious of painters’ ability to shift reality in whichever direction they choose. With this work, I wanted to do something similar: create a world that is familiar yet also wild, otherworldly – presenting landscape not as it may appear visually, but how it could be experienced emotively and through the imagination."

- Terri Loewenthal

Artist Statement

It's a different world down there. It would be easy to say that deep down in a canyon grander than The Grand Canyon, you are going back in time to a pristine otherworld, a desert oasis of turquoise waterfalls where everything else beyond the lofty red rock walls - the sky, even - is another place entirely. But that would be too easy, even as it is undeniably true that the sublime, verdant natural beauty is transporting. It takes an effort to simply be present to the land. Spending time in Havasu Falls, I attempted both to position myself there and keep an awareness of my personal inheritance of culpability to the Hualapai people who belong to this land. In Staying with the Trouble (2016), Donna Haraway gave this effort the name "copresence," saying it "requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings." So, I sat and looked, and sometimes took out my camera.

Landscape photography is a visual exploration of our relationship to the land - a simple enough definition until you poke at "land," a word so much greater even than "place." Land fosters life and culture, holds history, has seen it all and will weather whatever is to come. Land has autonomy and deserves more reverence than white America has given it. In my work, I present how I experience the land: emotively. Staying with the Trouble in times of vast environmental degradation means finding new ways to caretake wild spaces, ways more expansive than conventional conservation. When I'm nestled by the river listening to birds converse, or water rippling over precariously-balanced boulder piles, or a breeze shuffling leaves in the distance, there's no question in my mind that everything around me is just as alive as I am. In these moments the Environmental Personhood Movement, the granting of legal personhood to natural entities, makes absolute sense. Havasu Falls is land teeming with life, alive itself, with plenty to say.

I've long considered the feeling of being loved synonymous with the feeling of being understood. To care for land starts by showing up. You have to go there to be there, to look actively, so as maybe to see. A picture brings into consciousness a particular set of details. The compositions I am able to create with my custom optics utilize elements beyond what a traditional photograph can frame. It's my attempt to indicate the spirit of a place. Legal personhood starts with conservation, and extends to acknowledging that nature is alive, spirit and all, and deserves a thriving coexistence. So, what do people need to thrive? Beyond the essentials of food, water, and shelter, people need love, care, respect and to be understood. How do I offer that to a river?

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