The following article was published by Square Cylinder on May 29, 2025.

“Things one sees through
a blurred sheet of glass, that figures, predestined,
condition of thought.”
—Robert Creeley, “Rain”
On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing (Song Cave, 2021).

Terri Loewenthal’s current show, “Mt. Tam,” includes six large format photographs on view in an intimate gallery, a stone’s throw away from the Pacific Ocean, in a remote town on the other side of Mt. Tamalpais. Loewenthal’s suite of soft-focus photographs depict images of the Pacific Ocean, Mt. Tamalpais, woods, rocks and other natural features, intersected with soft kaleidoscopic colors to capture a charismatic multiplicity of place. It’s a place that lies between the history of landscape photography, environmental precarity, and the regional mythos of Bolinas itself. The show thus conveys a Kodochromatic impression that almost, but not quite, lulls us out of danger, at once euphoric and evoking the sticky residue of pollution, wildfires, and the oversaturated capitalism that might use such images for branding. The tension between attraction and revulsion is what makes the exhibition compelling. In that duality there is a quiet homage to the failure of sixties utopian concerns that reverberates today. 

One large, framed color photograph, “Steep Ravine Beach (Coast Miwok land)” (2025), captures a background ridge line bisecting the top quarter of the image, its edge befuddled by faded repetition, as though the enlarger shifted in the dark room where the photograph was born. The mountain lacks conviction as a result. Its position feels vulnerable about its position in relation to flanking cliffsides that disappear in a haze at the pictorial center. The 42-by-56 inch photograph is additionally distorted by a prismatic wash of color: yellow, to green, to blue, violet, mauve, brown. Maybe the negatives were overexposed to produce this pleasant effect. Or perhaps the image is shot through a cloud of moisture. An identifiable strip of beach extends through the center of the picture’s ground, between rocks on one side and an encroaching surf on the other but like the flanking rock and mountain forms, the beach also remains unresolved by any horizon, not quite reconciled with the mountain’s vertical plane. Even the rocks are uncertain, layered by additional faded rock formations and saturated color.

In these unsteady, hallucinogenic depictions of this inherently remarkable landscape, Loewenthal captures the veils of place-ness as they exist simultaneously, in step with Creeley’s suggestion that what we see is conditioned by a window of thought, the frame of a camera, and the various histories that brought it to the present moment — of the landscape, the camera, the photographer, the memories of those who came before.

The politics of landscape photography form a bedrock of Loewenthal’s oeuvre. With origins in 18th century landscape paintings commissioned to survey, document, and advertise the natural resources of a sublime New World, the conceptual “landscape” was further developed via the camera’s technological advancement and the industrial revolution, all in service of American identity. Carleton Watkins (1829-1916), moved to California and, after a short apprenticeship, made a living first photographing mines and land claims for prospectors, and then Yosemite — an effort that catalyzed the national park system. That system of national treasures, it must be remembered, consist of lands forcibly taken from the Indigenous people who lived there. Later, Ansel Adams returned to Yosemite, using landscape photography to promote ecological care, with the faith that photography could serve as an ambassador of environmental consciousness. Adams was able to bridge the by-then widening gap between the rapidly growing industrial economy and his own impulse to preserve the natural environment. Like his predecessors, Adams’ relied upon the charismatic presence of mountains, rivers, and ancient trees, capturing an ecstatic buffet of rugged gray tones. Mt. Tam comes from this lineage. But then it departs.

“Cascade Falls (Coast Miwok Land)” and “Ballou Point (Coast Miwok Land)” hang as a diptych. Each depict redwood trees that appear as one, side by side, jutting up from the bottom right-hand corner to the top of the picture plane diagonally. Pine needles and branches dictate both compositions, as do the same oversaturated and iridescent colors that somehow naturalize a sulphuric sky. “Cascade Falls” traces a small waterfall in the bottom left-hand corner. “Ballou Point” excerpts the sea — water features that exist as mirage-like layers that stack effortlessly upon the otherwise wooded environment. 

Loewenthal asserts native presence with a consistently applied titular parenthesis: “Coast Miwok Land.” This references the tribe that lived in the region for thousands of years prior to the arrival of European settlers. This added language serves as another window to frame the work, countering precedents which featured “native tribes” to signify a universally savage past. And whereas predecessors captured crisp expansive depths of mountain ranges with omniscient long views, Loewenthal prefers short-range layers of the sea, rocks, mountains, and trees. These are captured from different vantages and presented simultaneously for a confounding effect, as if the camera itself is short-sighted and unsteady, unable to secure firm ground, overwhelmed by toxic and mechanical, yet alluring auras of color.

Here we glimpse Bolinas’ more recent history: as a small, reclusive town on the California coast whose residents customarily pulled the highway signs down to befuddle outsiders looking for directions. It acquired counterculture status in 1971 when two Standard Oil tankards collided in the San Francisco Bay, dumping 800,000 gallons of bunker fuel oil into the sea. Droves of volunteers came to clean up the mess, MacGyvering a boon to protect the Bolinas lagoon and spooning oil from rocky beaches by hand. Many never left. Loewenthal’s “Marin Seashore (Coast Miwok Land)” layers the Pacific on top of itself, with darker, larger, and ghosted rock forms in the mix. The line between the sky and ocean — an angled line across the near center of the picture plane — makes one appear the mirror of the other, as though we might swim in her phosphorescent clouds. The oil spilled here. 

If painting once served as a foil for Lowenthal’s predecessors, the works of “Mt. Tam” instead leverage internet screens and lifestyle brands for their counterpoint. With the right kind of slogan, you’d have an ad campaign. It’s become difficult to imagine an experience of landscape without the specter of commercial consumption that results in the precarity of these sites. If Adams hoped landscape photography could galvanize popular sentiment to environmental care, photography more often serves as a market vehicle dressed up with an environmental veneer. Writing in Bolinas, Phoebe MacAdams echoes Loewenthal’s shifting subjects: “Also, I remember when yes meant no and no meant yes. It was confusing then, too. Now, I look at the treetops swaying in the appreciative breeze.” Loewenthal’s images successfully capture layers of complexity that range from environmental precariousness to psychotropic introspection via the indisputable beauty of her natural subject, Mt. Tam. 

It’s not an accident that Bolinas has opened up, become more accessible, acquired its resident A-list celebrities that displace those who previously prioritized something else. It was an often awkward and substance-soaked ideal, famously described by the poet Alice Notely as a “horrible” place where everyone “… had goats, and they wanted you to read your poems out in a field while their children were running around making noise …” But that’s mostly gone, along with the town’s part as the Mexican land grant of the 1820s, the mid-century Gold Rush, and the late-century lumber industry. There is a story among poets that part of Creeley’s “Bolinas” manuscript was lost there, as though it may someday return, or as though we might always feel the pang of its possible absence. The place itself no longer exists — perhaps it never existed — and “Mt. Tam” similarly appears as a mirage: a smokescreen of delight that remains both ambivalent and profound, tracing back thousands of years and geological layers.