About Our Second Book – Terry Toedtemeier: Photographs, 1978–2008

For nearly four decades, Terry Norman Toedtemeier (1947–2008) trained his camera on the rocks, trees, deserts, and coastline of the Pacific Northwest. His images celebrate the beauty of a landscape he knew intimately, and are deeply informed by his lifelong study of geology. This, the second volume from the Northwest Photography Archive, will include approximately ninety photographs, made from the time that Toedtemeier shifted his artistic focus to the landscape in the late 1970s and continuing through the last period of his life, during which he had begun to explore new realms of color film and digital printing.

The images in Terry Toedtemeier: Photographs, 1978–2008 will be selected by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with Prudence F. Roberts, art historian and Toed­temeier’s wife, and Marci LeBrun, archivist of Toedtemeier’s work. Sandra Phillips’ essay for this volume will locate his artistic legacy within the history of twentieth-century art. Publication of the book will be accompanied by an exhibition at the Portland Art Museum.

For information on the rights and reproductions of Toedtemeier's work, contact Prudence Roberts at TNTEstate@gmail.com.

The Terry Toedtemeier Fund

Contributions to this fund will support the nonprofit publication of Terry Toedtemeier: Photographs, 1978–2008. Visit the SUPPORT page to learn more about donor benefits including advance copies of the book and archival, limited-edition, Toedtemeier estate prints.

The Northwest Photography Archive is a 501 (c)(3) organization and all donations are fully tax-deductible. Checks can be made out to "NWPA" and mailed to: 4828 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Portland, OR 97215. Credit cards can also be accepted over the phone at
503-231-6360. Contact us for more information.

About Terry Toedtemeier

Terry Toedtemeier, a native of Portland, Oregon, traced his ancestry back to the pioneer migrations of the 1850s. He earned a degree in earth sciences from Oregon State University, and, he wrote some years later, it was during a 1968 class in field geology that “my love of the field took root and my interest in geologic landforms began to have a context.”

By the early 1970s Toedtemeier had immersed himself in photography, experimenting with processes and subjects, but always finding himself drawn to the landscape. He was a co-founder of Blue Sky Gallery in Portland in 1975; a decade later he became the first curator of photography at the Portland Art Museum. In that position, which he held until his death, Toedtemeier assembled a collection of more than five thousand works and mounted a wide variety of exhibitions. In addition, he taught photography for many years at the Museum Art School, now the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Toedtemeier was an exceptional and highly regarded curator, but he was foremost a photographer: he left behind nearly a thousand prints and more than twenty thousand negatives. He was renowned among colleagues, collectors, and students for his extraordinary skills in the darkroom, resulting in photographs distinctive for their depth and their rich, sharply rendered detail as well as for their formal subtleties. Toed­temeier was a ruthless editor of his own work, and he experimented constantly, not only with papers and toning regimens, but with subject matter and vantage points. Among his most elegant compositions are aerial images, frequently shot at low elevations from a Piper Pacer; in these photographs he was able to encompass the entire span of a rim rock, the long sinuous course of a river, or the ooze of a vast lava field. He particularly loved photographing the sculptural formations of basalt, from the high desert of the Snake River Plain to the headlands of the northern Oregon coast. “The days spent in the field, pursuing these photographs,” Toedtemeier said, “are the best days of my life.”

Over the course of his career, Toedtemeier received significant awards and fellowships. These included multiple residencies at the Acadia Summer Arts Program in Bar Harbor, Maine; a Joshua Tree National Park artist-in-residence fellowship; a Regional Arts and Culture Council visual-artist fellowship; and an award for visual arts from the Flintridge Foundation, Pasadena, California.

Toedtemeier’s photographs have been included in one-person and group shows locally, nationally, and internationally. Basalt Exposures, a fifteen-year retrospective of a hundred prints, opened at the Art Gym at Oregon’s Marylhurst University in 1995, and traveled to the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland and the Washington State University Museum of Art in Pullman. Toed­temeier is among six contemporary photographers whose work will be seen in Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan, a major exhibition curated by Toby Jurovics and opening at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., in February 2010. Toedtemeier’s photographs can be found in the Art Museum, Prince­ton University; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Philadelphia Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Tacoma Art Museum; the Stanford Art Museum; and the Portland Art Museum, as well as numerous other public and private collections. His work is represented by PDX Contemporary Art.

Tributes to Terry

Tim Appelo's Remembrance in Portland Monthly
The Oregonian Obituary
The Portland Art Museum Obituary
The Portland Art Museum Message Board
PORT Post
PDX Contemporary Tribute
Photo District News
Hood River News
Art Scatter Post
Kink FM Podcast
Craig Hickman's Photo Tribute
Phil Bard's Photo Tribute


At right: Terry photographing the crowd at the publication
party for Wild Beauty in September, 2008.