Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography
Website: terriloewenthal.com
Terri Loewenthal is an Oakland-based photographer who has spent her career reimagining the tradition of American landscape photography. Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in South Florida, she earned a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she was initially a competitive athlete on a full volleyball scholarship. After graduating, she left corporate work behind following a house fire that prompted her to borrow her mother’s camera and spend a year traveling and camping solo across the American West — an experience that sparked both her passion for photography and a lifelong commitment to wilderness exploration.
Loewenthal has exhibited widely across the Bay Area and beyond, with solo and group shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the deYoung Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Eleanor Harwood Gallery (San Francisco), CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions (San Francisco), and Jackson Fine Art (Atlanta). Her work entered the permanent collections of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, the Tweed Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota, the City and County of San Francisco, the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and JPMorgan Chase, among others. In 2024, her photograph was selected as the official poster image for the Opéra de Paris 2024–25 season.
Beyond her photographic practice, Loewenthal founded The Chetwood, an artist residency program providing housing and community for artists visiting the Bay Area. She is a long-standing collaborator with Creative Growth and SF Camerawork, and has been an active musician for over a decade with the bands Call and Response, Rubies, and Shock.
Loewenthal works exclusively with single-exposure, in-camera photography, using custom optics she designed and built herself. Her technique compresses the surrounding 360-degree environment into a single image by compositing reflections and multiple vantage points during capture — a process she calls “in-camera collage.” The result is a body of work that reads as painterly and hallucinatory without any digital manipulation: saturated hues, kaleidoscopic layering of foreground and background, and a disorientation of spatial depth that transforms recognizable California landscapes into something simultaneously familiar and otherworldly.
Her practice is grounded in a critique of the predominantly male canon of American landscape photography, particularly the tradition of the “definitive view” associated with Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins. Loewenthal introduces a subjective, emotionally charged perspective that presents landscape not as it visually appears but as it might be experienced imaginatively — what she describes as “the truth of countless multiplicities: the human capacity for intimacy with land.” Recurring themes include the mythology of the American West, environmental ethics, Indigenous land stewardship, and the psychology of perception.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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